8-11-2002

Александр Сергеевич Пушкин

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

(1799 – 1837)

(*) Tradução do inglês de Ofélia Ribeiro.

Estas duas poesias foram musicadas por Rachmaninoff e interpretadas com muito brio pela eclética soprano finlandesa KARITA MATTILA, num memorável recital realizado na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian em 29-3-2003.

As traduções para português são de Nina Guerra e Filipe Guerra e foram extraídas de Aleksandr Púchkin, O Cavaleiro de Bronze e outros poemas,  Documenta Poetica n.º 47, Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, 1999.

 LINKS:

Biografias:                    O    O    O    O

Poesias em russo:        O    O    O

Poesias em inglês:       O    O   

Title
Pushkin

Author
T. J. Binyon

Publisher
HarperCollins, £30, 688 pp

ISBN
0002150840

The poet who was Russia
(Filed: 08/09/2002)

George Walden reviews Pushkin by T. J. Binyon

Many different styles are viable for biographers, as for novelists. W. Jackson Bate's Dr Johnson is the best biography I have read, and it adopts an empathetic approach. Although T. J. Binyon is a well-known Russian scholar he is far more detached from his subject, and yet his Pushkin is one of the great biographies of recent times.

"Scholarly" and "engrossing" are often antonyms, yet such is Binyon's skill in presenting his phenomenal research, and so patiently does he build up the reader's interest in the man and his era that he ends by captivating us.

For Westerners Pushkin has always been more historical celebrity than poet. (Astonishingly, the first full translation of his works has only recently appeared.) If the life has overshadowed the work to such an extent, it is partly because the old truism about how much is lost in translation is even truer of Russian verse, and truest of all in the supremely musical Pushkin. But it is also because Pushkin's was an almost absurdly romantic life.

From his teens his talent was recognised. He grew up amongst the gilded youth of his day, writing political and atheist verses that got him exiled to southern Russia by Alexander I - which did not prevent him carrying on numerous liaisons with what we would call titled ladies.

Allowed back to Moscow under Nicholas I, he married the beautiful Natalya, who loved flirting but remained faithful. Pushkin's jealousy came to a head when Georges d'Anthès, a member of the imperial guard, fell for Natalya. In a real-life drama that his famous poem Eugene Onegin had uncannily foreshadowed, Pushkin forced a duel, and was killed.

But Binyon does far more than recount this familiar story. What we need is a key to the enigma of a poet whom slavophiles, imperialists, communists and now capitalists have successively claimed as representing the spirit of Russia. And Binyon provides the answer: that the tragedy of Russia and of its national poet are one.

Reading this book is like breathing clean air, unpolluted by loaded or emotive commentary. The myths evaporate under Binyon's scrutiny, leaving a far more complex portrait of the poet than we are used to. The Pushkin that emerges is sombrely as well as dashingly romantic.

Throughout the author subtly stresses the less glittering side of Pushkin. The gilded youth was a minor noble with African (probably Cameroonian) blood in his veins, had little money and was not even thought good-looking. "A Negro profile acquired from his mother did not embellish his face. Add to this dreadful side-whiskers, dishevelled hair, nails like claws, a small stature, affectation of manners, an arrogant attitude to the women he chose to love . . . and boundless self-esteem." The observer could have added that he wrote obscene verses (some juvenile, some hilarious); that he was a drinker and manic gambler, in debt all his life; a cynic who seduced peasant girls and dumped them when they got pregnant; and on occasion the contemporary equivalent of a champagne socialist.

It is here that the myths are most stubborn. It was known that Pushkin accommodated himself to autocracy, in the unattractive shape of Nicholas I. But Binyon gives us the full sordid facts about his dealings with Nicholas, both face to face and through his lugubrious chief of police, Benckendorff. The Tsar's attitude to the poet is dismally reminiscent of Stalin's cat-and-mouse relationship with writers such as Pasternak: he would summon him for admonitory chats (Stalin used the phone), and then, to Pushkin's mortification, made him a "Gentleman of the Chamber".

Sometimes the poet wriggled in the autocrat's malign embrace, at others he appeared to bask in it. Binyon makes no judgment, and you can see why. What do you do if you are a brilliant poet with libertarian instincts and Russia is your prison? (The enormously well-read Pushkin never went abroad). And what if you are not even permitted to travel from one part of the prison to another without the Tsar's permission? How can you write if your work must be submitted to the censorship of a despot who does not hesitate to erase whole lines in your work, as in the case of The Bronze Horseman whose somewhat ambiguous celebration of Russian imperialism made Nicholas nervous?

If you are Pushkin, you compromise. He was no impulsive rebel, except in youth. Binyon is less ambivalent about his part in the 1825 Decembrist uprising than other biographers, using documentary evidence to show just how far he stood aside from it. He also details the number of serfs the poet owned, and how mortgaging them helped to pay Pushkin's gambling debts - an unromantic thought, especially when it emerges that their reformist-minded owner could be harsher than others.

In addition Binyon brings out the full extent of Pushkin's pan-Slav imperialism and Great Russian chauvinism, which horrified his liberal friends, especially when he wrote in support of the crushing of the Poles.

Everything we thought we knew about Pushkin becomes more shaded by Binyon's tireless elaboration. D'Anthès turns out to have been a seductive but slightly disturbed individual who virtually stalked Natalya; but in the end it was Pushkin who precipitated a denouement that was not inevitable. Binyon leaves the impression that the poet had a death wish, and that the political pressures and duplicities of his life had taken their toll.

But it was never simply a case of a poet of genius pitted against a loathsome autocracy. As Binyon shows, it was a case of a very Russian poet enmeshed in a very Russian system. For all its imperial glitter - the court and the balls - Russia was a squalid country, and Pushkin's life had its share of moral squalor. The endless tragedy of Russia was echoed in his life.

Only a biographer of the first rank could show how the poet's brilliant spirit was extinguished, not just by a regime, but by elements in that regime that to some extent reflected his own personality. That is true tragedy, and that is Russia.

·  George Walden's 'Who is a Dandy?' is published this month by Gibson Square.

The philandering poet
(Filed: 28/09/2002)

Alan Marshall reviews Pushkin by T J Binyon

'Imagine," wrote the 33-year-old Pushkin to a friend, "my wife has been maladroit enough to give birth to a little lithograph of me. I am in despair at it, in spite of my self-conceit." Russia's greatest poet was no oil painting. With the conventional prejudice of the day, he and his contemporaries blamed his Negro blood - but "dreadful side-whiskers, dishevelled hair, nails like claws, [and] a small stature" can't have helped.

In truth, Pushkin revelled in his ancestry and liked to exaggerate its importance, referring to himself in a fit of pique as "a nobleman of 600 years standing". He was born in 1799, and was descended from minor aristocrats on his father's side, an African great-grandfather on his mother's - a "Blackamoor" who was given to Peter the Great and became his favourite. In a way, it was an omen. As T J Binyon's superb new biography demonstrates, tsars would play a critical and even intimate part in Pushkin's own life.

The 1800s in Russia were an age of imperialism, autocracy and revolution. Revolution took the form of the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Binyon concludes that, while Pushkin had "close friends" among the Decembrists, his work reveals no "deep involvement with Decembrist ideas", although he boasted to the tsar that he "would have been in the ranks of the rebels" if he had been at liberty.

Apart from his attacks on serfdom, his youthful political verse was hardly revolutionary. "Liberty: an Ode" expressed an abstract "conservative liberalism" and defended the monarchy. His epigrams and satires were potentially more disturbing, with their bountiful scatological imagery and delightful energetic irreverence. In Binyon's rather good alliterative translation, the poet addresses the tsar: "Your plump posterior you / Cleanse with calico; / I do not pamper / My sinful hole in this childish manner, / But with one of Khostov's harsh odes, / Wipe it though I wince."

No surprise, then, that Alexander I sent him into exile before he reached his 21st birthday, when he was already being spoken of as Russia's most gifted poet. Eugene Onegin, a "pocket mirror" of fashionable St Petersburg youth, was mostly composed in the provinces, where he lived under intermittent surveillance for the next six years. "The devil take Onegin!" he wrote to his publisher. "It's myself I want to publish or release into society."

Apart from poetry, Pushkin liked to occupy himself with duelling, gambling and women. He arrived for one duel "with a hatful of cherries", which he ate while his opponent fired. "Instead of writing the seventh chapter of Onegin," he complains to a friend, "I am losing the fourth at shtoss" (a card game). His philandering could get in the way of composition. Waiting impatiently for him to finish his first book, the mock-heroic epic Ruslan and Lyudmila, a friend commented that "if he were to have three or four more doses of clap, it would be in the bag".

Pushkin lived permanently beyond his means, but writing was the only work that he was willing to countenance. Binyon writes drily that for the duration of his appointment to the foreign office, Pushkin had to "reconcile taking a salary with doing nothing to earn it".

It was Nicholas I who eventually summoned him back to St Petersburg. Just three years older than Pushkin, he doesn't come out of this book too badly. He took a coolly sympathetic interest in the poet's impassioned career, and doesn't seem to have taken advantage of Pushkin's beautiful wife. He also tried to protect him against the habit of impetuous belligerence that led to his death. On the other hand, he tied Pushkin to the royal court, refused to let him travel abroad and, worst of all, when he didn't take it upon himself to interfere directly (as he did with Boris Godunov), left his work at the mercy of self-serving bureaucratic censors.

"Blessed is he, who was youthful in his youth," Pushkin writes in Onegin, "Who did not shun the fashionable crowd, / Who at twenty was a fop or a rake, / And at thirty advantageously married."

Marriage, jealousy, frustration and despair all played a part in Pushkin's death on a wintry January day in 1837. Binyon relates the events in extraordinary detail, while handling the action with an urgent economy. This is his method throughout.

Apart from one incongruous reference to "stalker syndrome", he wisely spares us any superfluous psychological speculation, building up instead a richly complicated portrait from an enormous cast of characters and sources. It all amounts to a grippingly entertaining and magnificently authoritative account of the poet's life, which is, almost unbelievably, the first to appear in any language since 1937.

September 25, 2002

No foreign biographer has yet conveyed the full complexity of Russia’s greatest poet to the English-speaking world, says Orlando Figes

A crime against rhyme

PUSHKIN
by T. J. Binyon
HarperCollins, £30; 731pp
ISBN 0 0021 5084 0
 

Pushkin is a hard subject for the foreign biographer. None has yet conveyed the full complexity of Russia’s greatest poet to the English-speaking world. Language is the obvious barrier — the playfulness and easy rhyming elegance of Pushkin’s sparkling verse is lost in translation. And his great achievement was to shape the literary language through his poetry.

Another obstacle is the thick texture of Russian intellectual history (readers who have been to see the new Tom Stoppard play will know exactly what I mean). In 19th-century Russia poetry was closely intertwined with politics and history; it played a crucial role in fashioning the national identity, in setting moral values and ideas; and in ways that English readers may find hard to understand, it was a cultural space, an imaginary shadow of the real Russia, where the intelligentsia lived.

Tim Binyon’s long-awaited life of Pushkin is by far the most important to appear in many years. It is a magnificent achievement, a monument to a life of scholarship, but at 700 densely-printed pages it is not an introduction to the poet’s life and work. One really needs to be a specialist to get the most from this deeply learned book.

Binyon follows in the best traditions of Russian Pushkin scholarship, on which his work is squarely based. The attention to detail is painstaking. When the poet travels, when he appears at court, when he makes a new acquaintance or simply writes a letter to a friend, it is duly noted by his biographer.

In general the effect is to create an intimate portrait of Pushkin’s character. The poet comes alive when Binyon gives the details of his endless flirtations (Pushkin claimed that the point of life was “to make oneself attractive to women”); when he cites examples of his brilliant (if coarsely sexual) wit; or when he catches him in the process of writing — sitting up in bed surrounded by paper, pen in hand and beating it in time “as he recited, nodding his head in unison”. Broader themes are also well captured by Binyon’s watchful eye — Pushkin’s life-long struggle to break free from the service obligations of his noble class (there is a wonderful account of Pushkin being sent to the Kherson district to report on an infestation of locusts) or his deep ambivalence towards the Tsar.

Pushkin was a monarchist. But Aleksander banished him to exile in the south (from 1820 to 1824) for his freedom-loving verse; and then, following the supression of the Decembrist uprising in 1825, Nicholas I became his personal censor and kept him at the court.

Binyon gives important details on Pushkin’s final months. There is no better account of the poet’s dispute with d’Anthès, who had flirted with his wife; nor of the duel which took his life, at the same age as the century, in 1837.

But otherwise it is a case of the proverbial woods and trees. There are just too many details for the general reader to cut through: too many lists of places visited; too many portraits of minor characters; too many unnecessary facts (from the history of theatre buildings to the rules of card games Pushkin played).

Yet there are many instances where Binyon does not give sufficient explanation of the historical or cultural context for the non-specialist to find his way. He never really stops to analyse the qualities of Pushkin’s verse; nor to explain why his use of the language was so original.

Without an explanation of the undeveloped state of the literary language in the 18th century — when the writer’s lexicon was basically adapted from French — it is hard to understand the breakthrough Pushkin made when he began to write in the language of plain speech.

Equally, one cannot understand why Pushkin wrote like this, unless one sees his writing (and not just the verse but the histories and the folklore) against the background of a national reaction against the intellectual empire of the French following the War of 1812.

Noblemen like Pushkin switched from speaking French to their native tongue; they russified their customs and their dress; and they sought to shape a literary language that could reach a national readership. Pushkin’s Russian did just that: it combined the gallicized or “salon” language of educated thought and sentiment with the crude colloquialisms of the village and the inn.

This relates to my other main complaint about this book: one does not really get a sense of Pushkin’s verse. There are lots of references to the major works that assume specialist knowledge; but when Binyon comes to discuss them in their own right, he does not help the English-language reader to imagine what they are actually like. Neither of the poet’s two great masterpieces (the verse novel Eugene Onegin and the long poem The Bronze Horseman) receives more than a couple of pages — just enough for an outline of the plot and one or two comments, but not for a larger discussion either of their literary qualities or their impact on society.

Moreover, as with all the cited works, Binyon has provided his own translations. I understand the reasoning: there is no English translation of Pushkin’s complete works and this way, as Binyon puts it in the preface, “Pushkin would at least speak with a single voice”. But Binyon’s translations are so literal and wooden that readers may well wonder what the fuss is all about.

Here is Binyon’s version of an epigraph he cites from Eugene Onegin:

Blessed is he, who was youthful in his youth, Bless who at the proper time mature