SOURCE: "Pushkin's Tales," in Partisan Review, Vol. LIX, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 197-215.

Pushkin is not only Russia's primary and archetypal author but her most astonishingly versatile one. He was himself fascinated by Mozart, whose music he deeply admired, and there is something Mozartian about his genius, which is in the same manner with variety, gaiety and depth. In one of his "Little Tragedies"—brief "dramas of investigation" as he called them—he contrasted the temperament of Mozart with that of the talented and industrious but uninspired composer Salieri, and implied that genius often prefers to reside in a wholly simple, open and unpretending personality. Keats said of Shakespeare—and he may have been thinking of himself as well—that instead of a powerful and distinctive ego he possessed "negative capability." That sort of capability was certainly Pushkin's own great gift as a writer.

He was as much at home in prose as in verse. Like Shakespeare he borrowed a great deal, and he was perfectly happy to take inferior work and make something wonderful, indeed unique, out of it. He borrowed a dreadfully bad romantic play written in 1816 by the English author and journalist John Wilson, who afterwards became the "Christopher North" of Blackwood's Magazine, and wrote a savage review of Tennyson's early verses. Pushkin knew hardly any English, but Wilson's piece had been translated into French, in which he was fluent like all the Russian gentry class. The City of the Plague, which managed to bring in every sort of romantic cliché of the period—mad mothers, duels in graveyards, penitent and golden-hearted prostitutes—was not parodied by Pushkin but purified, and turned into a simple and deeply touching dramatic poem. In many of his prose tales and sketches he also borrowed the romantic properties and techniques of the period—ranging from sentimental stories for young ladies to the historical novels and tales of Sir Walter Scott's followers—and here, as we shall see, a strong element of the mischievous and the parodic sometimes enters, giving piquancy to his magically clear and straightforward prose style.

Pushkin came late to prose. And when he came to it he wrote it deliberately, with the intention of exploring what prose fiction and narrative should be like in Russian, what it could and should attempt to do. The form was in a sense still untried: there was no equivalent in Russia of the English essayists—Steele, Addison, Dr. Johnson—who had formed the taste and expectation of their readers, and offered the background model for later writers, from Scott and Jane Austen to Macaulay. Insofar as Pushkin had models they were the French authors of the eighteenth century, with whom however he felt no very strong or sympathetic affiliation, and the Russian historian Karamzin, who had himself copied them. In a brief unfinished essay on "Prose" which Pushkin wrote around 1822, when he was twenty-three years old, he commented that "Voltaire may be regarded as an excellent example of prose style," and that "precision and tidiness are the prime methods of prose . . . poetry is another matter." "Whose prose is the best in our literature?" he goes on. "Karamzin's. This is no great praise."

Nonetheless he felt great respect for the Russian historian who was old enough to be his grandfather; and he was to write a good deal of history himself in the short time that was given to him: an account of the rebellion of Pugachev, the Cossack leader of Catharine the Great's time, and a projected volume on her great predecessor, Peter the Great. Russia's history had always fascinated Pushkin, as can be seen from the way he handled his drama of Boris Godunov; and he always took a particular interest in the career of the great Tsar who had founded the modern Russian state, and in the Cossack rebel who had come closest to overthrowing it. The latter is in some sense the hero of Pushkin's short and masterly historical novel, The Captain's Daughter, and the Tsar and his entourage would have been the subject of The Negro of Peter the Great, an historical sketch which went uncompleted. Pushkin's great-grandfather, probably an Ethiopian, had been presented as a page to Peter from the Turkish court, and had risen to become a general and to found a landowning family. Pushkin was very proud of his African ancestry on his mother's side, that of the Gannibals, and his black hair and swarthy complexion gave him a distinctly African appearance. His friends had an affection for his "negro" face, and he attributed to the same source his volatile temperament and strong sexual passions.

Pushkin began to write poetry while he was still at the Lycée which Alexander I had set up at the village of Tsarskoe Selo (now renamed Pushkin) outside St. Petersburg. His early French-influenced verses are quite unremarkable, being chiefly concerned with his many friends and with the liberal sentiments fashionable among bright young Russians of the upper class in 1818. Only a few years after Russia's great victory over Napoleon political reaction had set in, and the climate of hope and enlightenment had gone sour with the waning popularity among the upper class of Tsar Alexander himself. During these years Pushkin was hard up, and his parents in Moscow—not too well off themselves—showed little interest in his prospects of welfare. He frequented the theater and the ladies of the Petersburg demi-monde, and was in a set of rich and rakish young men; he may also have taken part in duels, of a less serious sort than the one in which he was to die less than twenty years later. Many of his friends were active liberals, already engaged in the conspiracies against the government which were to lead to the Decembrist insurrection in St. Petersburg in 1825, after which some were hanged and others exiled for life to Siberia. Pushkin was absent in the south of Russia at the time of the revolt, but would have been on the square with his comrades had he been in town, despite the fact that he knew nothing of their plans and had never been trusted with any secret information. Although he had belonged like them to a revolutionary society called the Green Lamp, his friends knew that he was not really a political animal. They admired his verses and epigrams, which were helping the cause, but considered him too frivolous for the responsibilities of a conspirator.

Pushkin gambled heavily at this time, as he was to do all his life; and his friends and his gambling form the background of one of the most exciting and melodramatic tales he was later to write "Pikovaya Dama," The Queen of Spades. He began his career as a narrator by writing a sparkling fairy-tale in verse, Ruslan and Lyudmila, with its magical opening on the green oak tree by the sea shore, the learned cat on its golden chain, the thirty knights taking lessons form their "sea-tutor" in underwater adventures. These were common tales from Russian folklore which Pushkin had hard when young from his old nurse, to whose memory he was to write one of his most affectionate and best-known lyrics. He recalled the stories she had told him with that vividly unselfconscious charm—his own unique sort of innocence—which instantly became for the Russian language and Russian poetry what Mozart is to music. In spite of the rackety and even dangerous life he habitually led, Pushkin always retained the genius and the freshness of this particular innocence, which seems a part of his wholly unpretentious instinct as an artist for directness, simplicity and economy.

In addition to wonderful lyrics and tales in verse he was also writing in these early days epigrams and verses of a politically fashionable kind, in favour of liberty and against tyranny and those who were taken to be the Tsar's evil advisers. Some of these were soon drawn to Alexander's attention, and it was suggested that a mild form of exile would be a suitable penalty for the talented but misguided poet. Pushkin was sent to south Russia, to serve on the "Board of Protection of Foreign Colonists," but luck was with him, for he fell in with some old and powerful friends, the Raevskys, who virtually adopted him for his period of banishment. He went with them to the Caucasus, where he obtained the material and local color for oriental verse tales in the manner of Byron, and he also fell in love with a youthful Raevsky daughter, whose small feet he later celebrated in a famous stanza of his verse novel Eugene Onegin. (Pushkin had a thing about ladies' feet, and was as engagingly direct on that subject as he was on his other emotional and social feelings.) Malis Rinich, the young wife of a Dalmatian merchant, was another friend, and in this case mistress too, that he made at this time; but he shared her favors with many others, and he came to know the extremes of jealousy which haunt his first serious and searching long poem, The Gipsies. Two particularly beautiful love lyrics are addressed to the memory of Amalia, who later returned with her husband to her native land, where she died of consumption.

Pushkin had the kind of temperament, at once loyal and affectionate, childish and impulsive, that finds it almost impossible to keep out of hot water. The viceroy with a cold heart and a passion for propriety and power (he makes a brief but telling appearance in Tolstoy's last story, Hadji Murad), disliked the poet's guidelines bonhomie and sent unfavorable reports on him to the capital. The authorities also opened a letter in which Pushkin cheerily remarked that he had been "taking lessons in atheism." Like a boy expelled from school he was dismissed from the nominal post he held and ordered to live on the small parental estate at Mihailovskoye, not far from Petersburg. There he settled down to work and read, with his old nurse for company. He continued his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and began writing the historical play Boris Godunov.

After the failure of the Decembrist conspiracy and the execution or exile of many of his friends, Pushkin was summoned to Moscow by the new Tsar, Nicholas I, and he came expecting the worst. But by one of those paradoxes not uncommon on the Russian public scene the new Tsar received him kindly, having decided that Pushkin was flattered by the young Tsar, took to him, and became for some years a loyal supporter. He is said to have freely confessed his solidarity with the executed rebels, but whatever he did or did not say he was certainly seduced by the Tsar's proffered benevolence and patronage. Part of the bait negligently offered by Nicholas was the opportunity to work in the historical archives, and on a project for educational reform.

Whatever his own inclination the poet thus became involved near the center of power, the great and coming power of imperial Russia. It is difficult to overstress the singularity and importance of this for such a poet and writer as Pushkin, destined as he was for absolute prominence as the model for Russian authorship and literary genius. Pushkin's attitude to authority was possibly not so different from Shakespeare's—he saw through it and yet was fascinated by it, and in a sense admiring—and this ambivalence is in its own way as marked in the great writers who followed him—Gogol and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy. His marvelous and uncanny poem The Bronze Horseman is as much a celebration of the great Tsar Peter, personified by his equestrian statue on the bank of the river Neva in the city he founded, as it is a cry of pity and protest from underneath, for the little man who only wants to marry his sweetheart and live a quiet life. Written at the height of his poetic maturity, The Bronze Horseman was not published in Pushkin's lifetime. At the time he wrote it he was no longer persona grata with the Tsar and he was well aware what disapproval the poem would incur from the imperial censorship.

Nonetheless, Pushkin's almost obsessional interest in the figure of Peter the Great had projected itself briefly on Nicholas as Peter's successor, and he compared the opening of Nicholas's reign with Peter's in an early poem ("In hope of all the good and glory/ I look ahead devoid of fear") which won only disapproval from his liberal friends, but which was to be rapturously quoted by Dostoevsky in his encomium on the fifteenth anniversary of Pushkin's death. Pushkin could be "used," just as Shakespeare had come to be, by different factions and ideologies: and yet all Russian readers and writers tacitly acknowledge how free he in fact remains from any connection with such things. It is his art that liberates: the poet Blok wrote of "the gloomy roll-call of Russian tyrants and executioners, and opposite to them one bright name—Pushkin."

Yet for Russians Pushkin touches every nerve in his country's feeling, is central to its whole sensibility. Whereas the politics of Goethe's Faust are those of a model German duchy, the politics of The Bronze Horseman are those of a rapidly expanding and ruthless empire. And Pushkin was never left isolated, like Dante in exile or Wordsworth after the French Revolution, to work out a personal and compensatory vision of his own. No wonder Russians under Stalin, or in the dark days of invasion and terror, turned instinctively to Pushkin: the responses of his art are so various, yet so immediate and so spontaneous. The poem in celebration of Nicholas's accession to the throne, the tenderly impassive and mysterious poem of farewell to the Decembrists, "Arion," and the indignant rhetoric of the ode against the European supporters of the Polish rebellion, "To the Slanderers of Russia"—all possess in contrasting ways the kind of authority that comes not from the proper sort of ideology or belief but from the urgent pressures of involuntary experience. If he had really come to terms with and become a part of the system, or if he had succeeded in his application—made several times during his exile in Mikhailovskoye—to go abroad into what might have become a kind of emigration, he could not have achieved that luminous understanding both of power and of sympathy with the oppressed which is revealed in The Bronze Horseman, in his novel The Captain's Daughter, and in his history of Pugachev's rebellion.

His ominous relation with the Tsar was in the end to be the death of Pushkin. Having visited the Caucasus again, this time with his brother Lev who was there in the army, he renewed his courtship of Natalia Goncharova, a beautiful girl of seventeen who had turned him down six months before. Her family was as impoverished as Pushkin's, but Natalia and her mother now saw possibilities in his connection with the imperial court. She returned Pushkin's love after a fashion, and when they were married became very dependent on him. She wanted to appear and indeed tried to be a good wife; but she wanted everything else as well that high society could give her. The Tsar soon noticed her remarkable beauty, and insisted on Pushkin becoming a court page, an appointment absurdly incongruous with his age and position, in order that his wife would be invited to every ball at the palace.

The situation might seem set for disaster, and yet Pushkin was not, as was his great successor and near contemporary Lermontov, a tragic character with a Byronic besoin de fatalité. Though he was volatile and quick to take offence, his cheerful and good-natured disposition made him, like Mozart, a family man who might have lived to a good age if things had gone differently, and happily seen his children growing up about him. Although her worldliness and flirtatiousness would have continued to vex him for a time, Natalia's fondness for him and dependence on him might have increased as she grew older. What sort of a writer would he have become in that case? That is hard to say, as it is in the parallel cases of Keats, Byron or Shelley. At the time of his death he had almost given up writing poetry, but his extraordinary versatility was expanding in other directions: he was trying out a variety of prose fictions, "inventing" the kinds of novels which his successors would enlarge and develop. Whether or not he would have brought some or all of them to fruition, given time and leisure, these beginnings remain in themselves a remarkable and varied achievement. Some of the unfinished chapters remind us of Stendhal or Balzac, some of Fontane or of Kleist (whom Pushkin never read, and who had shot himself in Berlin when Pushkin was a boy at school); some even of Thackeray, Trollope or George Eliot. Of such diversity were the rapid traces of Pushkin's maturing genius.

His prose work contains masterpieces, like the tales and the historical nouvelles, and many more things that might have become masterpieces. But the cares of his family—his wife was extravagant—of business and debt, were beginning to weigh heavily upon him. One thing that cheered him at this time was the permission to found and edit a new journal. The Contemporary (Sovremennik) was to be on the model of the famous English reviews like the Edinburgh, and Pushkin had hopes of its successfully rivalling the other Russian journals. In one of them, published in Moscow, the fervent young ideologue Belinsky was already writing, and was to become a martyr to the great new cause of "committed" literature. That was against all Pushkin's artistic instincts, although he himself was revered by Belinsky, who sought to enlist Pushkin's work after his death in the service of the new social and political awareness.

Probably because it was felt to be behind the times, The Contemporary was not a great success, and it was soon losing money. This did nothing to relieve Pushkin's debts, but they had become the least of his troubles. In 1834 a young French royalist emigré, Baron d'Anthes, was admitted to the Tsar's Chevalier Guard through the influence of the Dutch ambassador, who had adopted him as a son. Natalia Pushkin was recognized as the most beautiful woman in the circles he now moved in, and he at once began to pay court to her. Natalia was flattered by his attentions and enjoyed his company, but there is no likelihood that she fell in love with him: she was too much in love already with the whole social world of the capital. Her openness about it with her husband did nothing to decrease his irritation and a growing sense of the impossibility of his position. Where his wife was concerned he had been neither a gloomy nor a jealous husband, and the idea of a wife whose looks were universally admired had appealed to him as much as the prospect of a family and a home. He had no illusions about the probable nature of their life together. "Il nest de bonheur que dans les voies communes," he had written to a friend, quoting the last sentence of Chateaubriand's René. "Trials and tribulations will not astonish me. They are included in my family budget. Any joy will be something I did not expect."

But this good-natured sanity and commonsense were alas not the end of the matter. The strong superstitious element in Pushkin's make-up may have convinced him that he had met his fate, in every sense, when he met his wife. In his terse and lively "Little Tragedy," The Stone Guest, written in the country in one of his last great creative periods, he presents a Don Juan who loves all his many conquests, but is finally and fatally attracted to me last, the wife of the Commander. He loves her for her statuesque unresponsiveness, and begs from her "one cold and peaceful kiss." In an essay on The Stone Guest the poet Anna Akhmatova has suggested it comes closer to Pushkin's own outlook and emotional temperament than any of his other works.

But ordinary commonplace domesticity, the poetic humor and heroism of the commonplace, is never far away from Pushkin, as for his young clerk in The Bronze Horseman and for the youthful hero of The Captain's Daughter. In his case it took the form of an absurd complication that might have occurred in his own verse novel Eugene Onegin: the unwelcome presence in his house of Natalia's two elder sisters, who had come to the capital to find husbands. Ekaterina Goncharova fell for d'Anthès, who made use of this as a pretext for frequent visits to Natalia. Pushkin had received anonymous notes informing him of his election to "The Serene Order of Cuckolds," implying that his wife had become the Tsar's mistress. This was almost certainly not the case, although after her husband's death she may have become for a short while maîtresse en titre to the Tsar. Such cruel facetiousness was just what would upset the poet most, and believing the Dutch ambassador was behind it, he challenged him to a duel. But the old man denied everything, and the quarrel was patched up for a time when d'Anthès actually became engaged to Natalia's sister, the nominal object of his pursuit, and they got married.

Natalia was much upset and came to her husband for comfort and reassurance. In her diary Countess Fiquelmont, of the capital's beau monde, suggested that Natalia wanted Pushkin to tell her her handsome admirer still loved her and had only married her sister as second best. Pushkin seems to have advised his wife with tenderness and good sense and asked her to behave with decorum. But it was a fact that her brother-in-law was soon as attentive as ever, and Pushkin was tormented beyond measure by the amusement of society, and its patronage of an increasingly farcical situation. A duel, if he survived it, would certainly mean exile to his estate and the end of this Petersburg nightmare. He sent a note so offensive to the ambassador and his adopted son that d'Anthès challenged him, and a duel was fought the next day in a quiet suburb deep in snow. D'Anthès, who was a crack shot, fired first and Pushkin was fatally wounded. Prostrate, he managed to fire his own shot and slightly wound his opponent. He died two days later and was buried at the monastery near Mikhailovskoye, his funeral attended by a great crowd of all classes. The Tsar wrote to Pushkin on his deathbed, urging him to die as a Christian and promising to look after his family. His debts were paid and his widow received a pension, afterwards marrying an officer who had been of their circles. D'Anthès was expelled from Russia and returned to France where he entered politics and died in 1895. He never expressed the smallest penitence or regret for having killed Russia's greatest poet.

In his later years, when he had taken to writing mostly prose, Pushkin did his work almost entirely at the small country estate of Boldino, in the months of October and early November. These "Boldino autumns," as they have come to be called, were productive of an astonishingly varied quantity of marvellous compositions. Like the improvisatore of his own fragmentary medley, "Egyptian Nights," Pushkin wrote very fast when the mood was on him, for twelve or fifteen hours a day, and revised afterwards at his leisure back in the capital. The Boldino autumn of 1830 saw the creation both of the "Little Tragedies"—The Stone Guest, Mozart and Salteri, and two others—and the Tales of Belkin, Pushkin's first considered and completed venture into prose, which was published anonymously in the following year. He also wrote the magical poem Ocen ("Autumn"), included in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse edited by Dimitri Obolensky, which in its relaxed and lyrically humorous stanzas gives a good idea of Pushkin's temperament and working methods.

Like Shakespeare Pushkin was not really a literary inventor or innovator: he was prepared to take up and supply whatever seemed in demand, remarking once that he sold his wares for the best price he could get, as the cobbler did his boots. In this spirit he decided very deliberately to write prose: poetry having come to him when he was young as naturally as the song to the bird. Every sentence of the Tales of Belkin is deprived of any poetic cadence, and made terse, transparent and effective. Pushkin very likely had in mind the remarks of his contemporary, the novelist Betuzhev. "A child is attracted to a rattle before it is attracted to a compass. . . . We have ceased to listen to poetry since everyone became able to write it. So there is a general outcry. 'Give us prose. Water, plain Water.'"

Pushkin might have smiled good-naturedly at these slighting comments on his natural medium; but it is a fact that, unlike earlier Romantic writers such as Coleridge, he thought the two media should be very firmly demarcated. "No writer of both prose and verse," observed one of his early critics, "in Russia or even in the west, has made such a severe and firm boundary between the two kinds of utterance." Russia's remarkable literary renaissance was developing so rapidly that it seems to have foreshortened in a few years the change from poetry seeming the "natural" medium to a time when prose and the novel were more dominant. With us the Elizabethans and Jacobeans who, as it were, "spoke" poetry are succeeded by Augustans who spoke prose, and then by Victorians who talked in fiction—a change that took place over more than three centuries. In Russia something like the same process occurred within a single generation. Pushkin and Lermontov, a poet who went on to write the remarkable novel. A Hero of Our Time, are its two great exemplars, both starting with poetry and ending with the novel.

But there were also many and in fact more popular writers at the time who plunged naively into the world of popular historical romance—the world familiarized throughout Europe by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Pushkin also borrowed from that source—the denouement of The Captain's Daughter bears a strong resemblance to that of The Heart of Midlothian, with Catharine the Great substituted for Queen Caroline—but Pushkin's style and approach have nothing in common with Scott's. It was Bestuzhev, the man who called for "plain water," who most closely imitated Scott, producing a Russian equivalent of that leisurely and relaxing medium, full of cliché and of the picturesque. The Waverley novels operated by sweep and volume, not by any discrimination of sentence or phrase. Pushkin's contemporaries and successors, even Lermontov in A Hero of Our Time, use the flow of imperfections and flowery clichés that were part of the new "spontaneity" of prose—its equivalent of the dashing artlessness of modern ballad and poetic romance—and it is this that Pushkin avoids, although without seeming to try to do so. His prose sounds prosaic, but never vapid or banal. Its spare elegance, which already seemed old-fashioned in Pushkin's time, is that of the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century. This was remarked on by his friends and contemporaries; and it is significant that when the Tales of Belkin first appeared it was accorded none of the widespread popularity that had greeted the first appearance of Pushkin's poems.

It must have seemed very simple, perhaps too simple, but this simplicity concealed a remarkable degree of subtlety. Lermontov saw it and made use of it. His exceedingly clever novel makes a very sophisticated use of multiple narrators, and this device is also the main technical feature of the Tales of Belkin. Pushkin, like other writers, probably got the basic idea from Scott, who had used it in the Waverley novels to maintain the appearance and convention of anonymity. Indeed it had become a common convention, though seldom so effectively and expertly handled as it is by Pushkin and Lermontov, or as it was to be by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights. The Victorians acquired an appetite for this sort of narrative mystification; but Pushkin's first audience were somewhat baffled, and certainly did not appreciate at first the finer points involved. They read the stories as short and rather simpleminded exercises in sentiment, romance and melodrama; and they were surprised and disillusioned when the word got around that they had been written by Russia's foremost poet.

In fact the first reader to really appreciate the Tales of Belkin was not Russian at all but French, and himself a writer. Prosper Mérimée had traveled widely in eastern Europe and Russia, and had learned the languages. Although young—four years younger than Pushkin—he already had a reputation, and Pushkin himself may well have read his early tales, so the influence was not all one way. Brief and sensational pieces, whether in the form of tales or dramas, like Pushkin's own "Little Tragedies," were very much in vogue at the time; and Mérimée had made his own name with his Théatre de Clara Gazul, which at first he successfully passed off as having been written by a Spanish actress. He also hoaxed his public with La Guzla, a collection of "illyria" poetry he had composed himself; and he went on to publish in 1845 the story of "Carmen" which inspired Bizet's opera.

Mérimée was also the first Westerner to discern the genius of Pushkin's poetry, although, when he attempted to interest his friend Flaubert in a translation of it, the novelist merely commented: "Il est plat, votre poète." Pushkin's lyrics never have revealed, and never will, their true virtues in translation. Their effect is all in the voices they give to the Russian language. But so sophisticated an artist as Flaubert would certainly have seen the point of the Tales of Belkin, which Mérimée translated in a spirited but rather free fashion, using the devices of sensationalism and understatement for their own sake, as his own tales are apt to do, and which indeed suits their crisp and ironic French idiom. "Come il insiste peu!" observed Mérimée admiringly of Pushkin's light touch; but it is significant that his own stories became much better known than Pushkin's internationally and have had a much greater influence on short-story style, contributing at a later date to the manner of a Kipling. Pushkin's are too uninsistent even to make the kind of deadpan impact we associate with the modern short story.

But they have other and in many ways more peculiar charms. Pushkin seems to have felt that prose should be as unmemorable as possible, never trapping itself in a phrase or an effect. As a poet he had only to open his mouth and what came out became eternal and proverbial in his own tongue. His instinct was that prose should be the opposite—a complete contrast. The device of multiple narration has much to do with this, dissolving as it does the single narrative tone of anecdote or nouvelle. When he had begun the "novel" about his own ancestor, The Negro of Peter the Great, he may have broken off in response to the tone such a genre was imposing on him: the local color of the current English historical novel, and the conventional French tale of gallantry and intrigue. The elaborate security measures which hedge the Tales of Belkin defend it from the dominance of such recognizable tones. We cannot, so to speak, tell from what direction the words are coming. The stories escape into a limbo in which the elements of parody appear and vanish without the apparent intention or consent of the narrator. The tales renew entirely the concept of the anecdote, as Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" renewed that of the dramatic fragment.

The "author" has undertaken only to arrange publication of the stories of "the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin"; so he writes to Belkin's heir and next of kin, who turns out never to have met Belkin, and who refers the would-be editor to a friend, a "candid and simple" fellow, who rambles on about the Belkin's literary projects (Pushkin always had a good many of those on hand) and how his manuscript, has been used by the housekeeper "for a number of domestic purposes," the windows in her room begin repaired with pages from an unfinished novel. Belkin had picked up tales from various quarters, and a footnote refers to the entries he made on his sources. "Miss K. I. T." supplied the romantic tales, and an army lieutenant "The Shot" Nor do the devices for referring authorship further and further back end there, for "The Shot" has three internal narrators and "The Station-master" two.

In spite of their air of parody, and of conscious and almost demure mischievousness, the Tales of Belkin are by no means lacking in human warmth and human comedy. They are not just experimental set pieces. The funniest of them, "The Station-master," is both the most parodic and yet at the same time the most moving, even compassionate, of the stories. The fashionable notion of "feeling" and "sentiment" had long since arrived in Russian literary circles, through the novels of Rousseau, and above all through Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, which had an extraordinary success in Russia, greater than in any other European country. They had been vulgarized in the historian Karamzin's novel Poor Liza, a tearjerker whose title explains itself, and which had made readers in St. Petersburg and Moscow weep buckets back in 1872. Poor Liza was seduced and abandoned by her lover and committed suicide: Dunya, the stationmaster's beautiful daughter, appears bound for the same fate, certainly in the eyes of her grief-stricken father; but then the unexpected occurs and the conventional pattern is broken. The hussar with whom she has run off does not desert her but makes her happy. As his mistress she is delighted to have children and grand clothes and a carriage; and she does not forget her sorrowing and unforgiving father but comes to kneel and weep by his grave. The reversal of expectation is not only comic by extremely touching, as well as being perfectly possible.

As early readers must have spotted, and critics were later to demonstrate, it also reverses the parable of the prodigal son, texts and pictures from which adorn the walls of the station master's little house. And, when Dunya goes off with her hussar, her father persists in interpreting the event in the light of the parable. He will search for his "lost lamb," forgive her and bring her home. When he traces the hussar to Petersburg the trail of the unexpected begins. He begs for his daughter to be restored to him, even though her honor is lost, but the ashamed and yet exasperated young man assures him that Dunya is very well off. "She loves me; she has become unaccustomed to her former style of life. And neither you nor she will forget what has happened." The parable in the Gospels necessarily passes over an important point to which Pushkin's spare narrative acutely draws our attention. Of course the prodigal son and his father could never have been on the same terms again: there would always have been unease and resentment. And a very droll and Pushkinian incident follows in this story. The young man forces some banknotes on the Stationmaster, which he indignantly flings on the pavement. "After having gone a few steps he stopped, reflected and returned . . . but the notes were no longer there." A young dandy has already picked them up and made off in a cab. As he tells his tale to the "Titular Counsellor" the old man wipes away tears, "partly induced by the punch, of which he had drunk five glasses in the course of his narrative, but for all that they had moved me deeply." Ironic reversal of the parable continues to the end, for it is the father and not the prodigal child who goes to the bad. He dies of drink, grieving over the fall of his prodigal daughter, who is bringing up a family in happiness and security.

None of Pushkin's parodies deride or belittle their source, but give it a further dimension of human interest. In "The Snowstorm" the concealed target is the contemporary vogue for tales about romantic elopements and demon bridegrooms; and the narrator—"Miss K. I. T."—not only shares the romantic feelings of her hero and heroine, rejoicing in the coincidence that brings Burmin to the feet of the girl on whom he has played his heartless jest, but she also appears unaware of the literary material—like the nightmare end of the heroine in Bürger's famous poem Lenore—on which her story draws. The spontaneity and innocence of the narrator thus gives the paradigm of the tale a new lease of freshness and surprise. The narrator gives a personal life to the story material, and Pushkin in the background plays this off against the convention of the anecdote itself. The shop assistant who is anecdotalist in "The Undertaker" naturally enters into the story's keen pride in trade, cheating and securing customers, to the point of sharing a kind of touchy dignity on the customers' behalf after they have been buried.

The sense of human nature in the stories is as penetrating, but also as casual and as unemphatic, as it is in Shakespeare's plays. The old Stationmaster, for instance, cannot understand that the events in individual lives do not necessarily follow the traditional patterns of the moral law and the scriptures. In "The Shot," Silvio is a man fixated by his own image, a melodramatist cut off from the prosaic world, and the operation of prose reveals him as a figure isolated by his eccentricity of will from the humdrum uncertainty and contingency of the prose world. I feel sure that Lermontov borrowed the figure of Silvio, and metamorphosed him into A Hero of Our Time. But there is nothing in the least demonstrative or exemplary about Pushkin's mode of narrative: his stories always avoid being contes. Lermontov learned from him the odd mixture of familiarity and evasiveness in the Tales', and Gogol, who deeply admired them, may be said to have developed and elaborated evasiveness as a sometimes almost flamboyant trademark of his own. Dostoevsky was to be influenced by Pushkin in the same direction.

Pushkin only created the figure of Belkin after the tales themselves were written, as a part of their mechanism of anonymity. He then seemed too promising a concept to waste, and Pushkin at once went on to write the History of the Village of Goryukhino, in which Belkin himself appears as the first-person narrator. This brilliantly funny and engaging piece relaxes all the method of the Tales. We learn how Ivan Petrovich, after a brief and uneventful military career, enters into his paternal inheritance, and out of sheer boredom determines to become a writer:

All kinds of poetry—for I still did not think if humble prose—were considered and appraised, and I at last opted for an epic poem, drawn from the history of the fatherland.

The epic hangs fire, and other kinds of writing are tried—ballads, tragedies, stories and finally history. Ivan Petrovich's attempts are in one sense a burlesque of Pushkin's own literary progress—a comment on the transition from poetry to prose, and from epic and romance to plain historical record. His unfinished "history" of the manor seems to take an unintentionally Shandean view of the nature and possibility of history itself; and "like a certain historian whose name escapes me" Ivan Petrovich lays down his pen and goes into the garden to reflect on what he has accomplished.

Attempting to transform the routine of life at the manor into history, as Gibbon had transformed the Roman empire, Ivan Petrovich behaves towards the reality of his world rather as Silvio and the Stationmaster behave in the tales he has collected: authorship and history are to him an escape from the facts, as Silvio has his chivalric isolation in revenge, and the Stationmaster his fantasy of the prodigal son. His appended "source" reveal the true, untidy, comic and miserable nature of things on a Russian estate, in which the peasants themselves take refuge from reality by looking back on a mythological "happy time." Pushkin's perception of history is not that of a scholar, but that of a Shakespeare whose understanding lies in his imagination and his creative powers.

The same quickness of perception flickers through the way he writes about high society. Before the Tales of Belkin were planned and completed he had been experimenting with a society novel, of which the opening pages exist in two or three fragmentary versions, notably one which begins "The guests were arriving at the dacha." As it happens, Tolstoy was to mention this opening when he was himself meditating on his novel Anna Karenina, exclaiming with admiration that this was the kind of way in which to begin a story. Several of his early drafts of Anna Karenina begin along similar lines. The way Tolstoy envisaged Anna and her situation was probably influenced and even inspired by Pushkin's sketch of a certain type of society woman at odds with her environment—intelligent, lonely, passionate, foolhardy, eventually shunned by her peers a misfit. There seems every likelihood that Pushkin knew such a person in the circles he frequented in the capital, and that he sympathized warmly with her predicament.

Be that as it may, he certainly had the idea of writing a novel about such a woman, her admirers and her eventual fate, treating the subject from the standpoint of the detached omniscient narrator, who both understands and feels for the subject of his scrutiny. Such a method would be used and indeed become common in later nineteenth-century fiction, and was already foreshadowed in Stendhal's novels, about which Stendhal himself once quizzically observed that they would obtain their readership at the end of the century. Flaubert, Tolstoy and George Eliot would all in their different ways perfect the method. But it seems likely that Pushkin, feeling his way into a style of prose that suited him, found the problem of striking a balance a hard one to solve, and preferred experimenting with a more personal and hybrid form of narrative, in which humor, fantasy, and sober realism could all be present on his own terms. This was how he shaped the melodrama of The Queen of Spades, his most successful and popular tale; and how—in a more grotesque genre—he proposed to combine verse and prose in an original medley for "Egyptian Nights," written in the autumn of 1835. Like Eugene Onegin itself, both have the Pushkinian quality of being touching and comical, sober and extravagant, at the same time; and both involve Pushkin's own ideas and lifestyle without compromising his own personality and his own privacy.

Its success lies in the force and sympathy of its human portrayals—the ancient countess, Hermann the Napoleonic hero, the modern young man on the make, and the ingénue Lizaveta Ivanovna. Although the tale is unified and complete the characters seem held in an unobtrusive but rigorous isolation from each other, reminiscent of the isolation which surrounded the heroine of Pushkin's abortive novel of society. The same high society, the world of the old countess and her grandson Tomsky, is the background of The Queen of Spades, and the atmosphere of that world is established with subtle simplicity in the opening sentence: "They were playing cards with Narumov, of the Horse Guards"—the same kind of opening sentence which Tolstoy admired and held up as a model. In his marvellous and terrifying stories of the Far Eastern gulag, Kolyma Tales, Varlaam Shalamov imitated this opening sentence, transposing the situation into the little world of privileged zeks who run the horse transport underground in the prisoner-operated goldmines, and in their spare time play cards, often with their own lives at stake.

"They were playing cards. ... " "They" are, so to speak, the people to belong to—the best people, with too much easy confidence even to bother to think of themselves as such, or to look down on others. The old countess accepts this charmed circle as she accepts herself, with the dégagée apathy of those who have always retained, in ever circumstance, every advantage simply by being still alive—"the hideous but indispensable ornament of the ball-room." Outside the circle stands Hermann, the ambitious young engineer officer and a man of the will; and outside it in another sense is the countess's young ward and companion, Lizaveta Ivanovna, with her pining youthful heart and forlorn desire to love and be loved. Completed by the negligent good-hearted Tomsky, the tableau presents an incomparably vivid and economical picture, which gives its real substance to the fantastic and melodramatic events of the story.

Pushkin was very proud of the fact that after the story appeared all the young gamblers of St. Petersburg began compulsively punting on the three seven and aces, the magic numbers which the old countess confided under duress to Hermann. Pushkin himself was very superstitious, and an inveterate gambler for high stakes to the end of his life, preferring himself to keep the bank a the game of shtos, or faro, which he describes. In The Queen of Spades Pushkin was writing for an audience who knew all about gambling, but it is not entirely easy for the modern reader to follow the pattern of event. The procedure would have been that the punter, Hermann, and the banker, Chekalinsky, each had a pack of cards. Hermann selected a card—the three on his first night—and put it face down on the table with his stake. The banker then dealt from his pack, facing a card alternately left and right. If a card of the same points as the punter had selected came up on his right the banker won; if on his left he lost to the punter. Hermann therefore wins on his deal two nights running. The punter could risk his stake plus all his previous winnings, as Hermann does on the third night, by turning down the corners of his card.

A writer such as Balzac or Kipling, or Ian Fleming at a later date, would have explained the gambling operation in detail, but Pushkin's spare narrative concentrates on the psychological suspense and the interplay of character. The supernatural element is itself psychological, with no resemblance to those tales of Hoffmann and Balzac in which a supernatural secret gives power to the possessor and in the end corrupts and destroys him. It would be hard to imagine anyone less suited to such a role as the old countess. She was not corrupted by the magic formula because she had no need of money and never thought of it. Once her debt of honor in Paris was paid (and as Pushkin reminds us she would not have been concerned to discharge a debt to a tradesman) she was never tempted to use her secret again, except once to help out a young protegé, and she never passed the secret on to her sons. The moral is obvious: class has no need of magic. Adhering to a way of life with all the tenacity of unconscious conviction, it is as difficult to corrupt as to reform. The old countess is just as she would have been if the extraordinary secret had never been revealed to her.

For young Hermann, on the contrary, a road to the power that money brings is all-important. The final touch at the macabre worldliness of the countess's funeral is the old court dignitary's whispered comment to the English bystander that the young officer who goes up like the others, to bid farewell to the coffin, was the countess's natural son. The Hermanns, and all they stand for, are indeed the natural sons of the old regime, and in a disturbing sense. There is cheerful irony in the ending—Hermann removed, Lizaveta married, Tomsky and the Princess Pauline betrothed—but the deeper implications of the tale are not at all reassuring. The future is haunted by the past it has destroyed and sought to exploit. When she is dead the old countess enters into a sinister intimacy with Hermann, unthinkable when she was alive; and the wink from the coffin is horribly at variance with her living self, and with the funeral decorum around her.

Although he admired "the Scottish enchanter," Pushkin was well aware of the shortcomings of his imitators. "These pale productions are read all over Europe," he remarked in a review. "Is it because the portrayal of bygone times, even if feeble and inaccurate, has . . . charm for the imagination sunk in the humdrum monotony of the present?" He probably felt that only recent history could be turned into genuine art; and both The Captain's Daughter and the unfinished Dubrovsky are set in the reign of Catharine, virtually "Sixty years since," like the subtitle of Scott's own progenitor, Waverley. Pushkin's prose style, with its sure sense of timing and its equable but resonant simplicity, is admirably suited to the tale of adventure in the recoverable past—perhaps better suited than to the society novels which he projected but never followed through. Pushkin's genius is of the kind that having made its point cannot bear to fill in the details, to repeat or to indulge itself in local color for its own sake. He admired Byron for being a writer who "liked to spring like a tiger from the jungle," and abandon his prey to others after a successful kill. That seems to be why he so often lost interest in a theme after he had revealed its inner potentiality.

But as his history of Pugachev's rebellion shows, he had staying power when he was deeply interested in the implications of so far-reaching and recent an event in Russian history. No wonder Tsar Nicholas, an expert in the techniques and precautions of despotism, took a special interest in Pushkin's task, and encouraged its progress, although both the history and its companion in fictional form, The Captain's Daughter had to pass an inquisitive and persnickety censorship. And yet what must have specially engaged Pushkin as he developed the novel was the relation he found coming into being between Grinev—the innocent, well-intentioned young man who does not think to question the status of the gentry class to which he belongs and its right to rule—and the crafty and cruel but also generous and amiable Cossack who has set up his own kind of rule among the peasantry. Pugachev is capable both of generosity and kindness: there is real fellowfeeling in young Grinev when he thinks of him with affection—and by his Christian name "Emelya"—disturbed in "spite of myself" at the thought of the fate that awaits him.

Every character in The Captain's Daughter has the kind of simple reality which Pushkin's swift and economical prose seems to bring effortlessly into being. Grinev's first arrival at the fortress, and the night of the blizzard, when he meets Pugachev, are especially memorable. Such moments occur too in Dubrovsky—the episode of setting fire to the family house with the officials in it, and the rescue of the cat by the blacksmith, are in Pushkin's best vein—but Durbrovsky himself is not much more than the conventional romantic mystery man of the period; and the feel of the tale never takes on a life of its own. The truth is that Pushkin—again not so unlike Shakespeare—seems to have had small instinctive gift for shaping and inventing a plot. Scott gives him a helping hand in The Captain's Daughter, for even the relation of Grinev and Pugachev echoes that between the young Waverley and Fergus McIvor. But after taking an interest in authentic court reports about a tyrannical landowner and his victim, a young member of the gentry who took in consequence to a life of banditry and revenge, Pushkin seems to have lost interest in his theme, and cast about for a way of finishing it that would suit a romance melodrama. Five possible synopses in Pushkin's hand exist, in most of which the story was to continue with Dubrosky escaping abroad, after Maria Kirilovna's wedding and her refusal to run off with him, and his return to Russia after she has become a widow. The authorities become suspicious, and there is a reference to a meeting at an inn and the figure of a police chief, who might have developed along the lines of Dostoevsky's quiet policeman in Crime and Punishment. Pushkin's own instinct might well have been to let the story finish without a happy ending, unfolding it to a natural conclusion as he had done in the case of his verse novel Eugene Onegin. But where prose was concerned he found himself much more in the grip of contemporary fashion and genre.

And yet the Tales of Belkin, The Queen of Spades and The Captain's Daughter are not only as much masterpieces as his tales in verse, but carry the same unmistakable and original stamp of his style and personality. That personality is still somewhat baffling to western readers, accustomed as they are to the idea of a "great writer" taking life and his art much more seriously than Pushkin seems to. The Russians can see Pushkin's experiment and inspiration everywhere in their literature, but for us it is not so easy. We may feel dissatisfied by what seems so simple or even obvious, to the point of saying with Flaubert, isn't this rather flat? But Pushkin is an acquired taste, and as we acquire it we begin to realize more and more the subtleties that lie beneath the simplicity of his manner. It is significant that even English and American writers who discover Pushkin today—the poet and novelist D. M. Thomas is one of them—can find him as inspiring now as Russian authors have always done; and as apt to oblige in complementing and leading on their own thoughts and ideas. Pushkin can seem like his own improvisatore in Egyptian Nights, just as in another sense he is like the aristocratic Charsky, who every now and then retires from his worldly life in own into the country and there scribbles down a load of "rubbish." But he also has an undoubted resemblance to the great queen Cleopatra, whom Pushkin, like Shakespeare, portrays as being at once infinitely and poetically seductive, and also sublimely commonplace and down to earth. The most engaging moment in that medley is when the ingenuous young lady's suggestion for a subject is drawn from the urn, and the improvisatore deferentially asks which lover she had in mind, "for the great queen had many." Pushkin's own powers of storytelling are almost equally varied.