INTRODUCTION
1. Igor Shafarevich, “Fenomen emigratsii,” Literaturnaya Rossiya no. 36 (September 8, 1989), 5.
2. Abram Tertz, “Chto takoe sotsialistichesky realizm,” in Fantastichesky mir Abrama Tertsa (New York: Inter-language Literary Associates, 1967), 446.
3. For a more thorough discussion of the significance of Sinyavsky’s pseudonym, see Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Sinyavsky/Tertz: The Evolution of the Writer in Exile,” Humanities in Society 7, no. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1984): 123–42.
4. Sinyavsky has maintained: “For example, Strolls with Pushkin was for me to a certain extent a continuation of my closing speech at the trial.” Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “An Interview with Andrei Sinyavsky,” Formations 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 11.
7. This is from Sinyavsky’s own description at his trial of the accusations made against him: “Sinyavsky topchet vsyo samoe svyatoe, vplot do materi.” “Poslednee slovo Andreya Sinyavskogo,” in Tsena metafory ili prestuplenie i nakazanie Sinyavskogo i Danielya (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 475.
8. “Interview with Andrei Sinyavsky.”
9. The dates of Pushkin’s life are given in this introduction according to the Julian calendar, observed in Russia during the poet’s lifetime, rather than the Gregorian.
10. A. S. Pushkin, “Rodoslovnaya Pushkinykh i Gannibalov,” cited in V. Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 7th ed. (1936; rpt. Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1970), 1:22. Sinyavsky read Veresaev’s compendium while in Lefortovo prison.
11. M. N. Makarov, “A. S. Pushkin v detstve,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:55.
12. I. I. Pushchin, cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:78.
13. F. N. Glinka, Vospominanie o piiticheskoi zhizni Pushkina, cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:77.
14. From V. Raevsky, Pushkin v litsee, cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:83–84.
15. A. S. Pushkin, Pis’ma, ed. B. L. Modzalevsky (1926; Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 1:9.
16. On the literary institutions of Pushkin’s time, see William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
17. Cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:135.
18. The two contenders are Ekaterina, the oldest daughter, and Mariya, who was only fourteen at the time. Mariya has drawn particular attention from Soviet Pushkinists, because she later married the Decembrist Sergei Volkonsky and followed him into Siberian exile.
19. A. S. Pushkin to L. S. Pushkin, September 24, 1820, Pis’ma, 1:12.
20. A. S. Pushkin to P. A. Vyazemsky (first half of March 1824, Odessa), Pis’ma,1:74–75. There is some disagreement as to who was the addressee of the letter, and in the English translation of Pushkin’s letters the addressee is identified as Kyukhelbeker. The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, trans. J. Thomas Shaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 156.
21. A. S. Pushkin to D. M. Shvarts (draft), A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii υ shesti tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1938), 6:91. Tatyana is the heroine of Evgeny Onegin.
22. One subtext that may have been on Sinyavsky’s mind in writing Strolls with Pushkin is the discrepancy, which many have found disturbing over the years, between the elevated diction of the poem and Pushkin’s less than reverent reference to Anna Kern as the “whore of Babylon” in a letter of May 1826.
23. Given the extent to which in the Soviet period the stories of the Decembrists and Pushkin have become intertwined, Soviet commentators have been ingenious in searching out ties between Pushkin and the Decembrists, on occasion perhaps stretching the evidence. What seems clear is that, whatever his personal and literary ties to the Decembrists, Pushkin was never taken into the conspirators’ confidence, probably because he was not considered sufficiently cool-headed and discreet.
24. As reported by A. G. Khomutova, cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 1:314.
25. Pushkin is said to have worked on his unfinished History of Peter the Great on the morning of his fatal duel.
26. Anna Olenina, Dnevnik Anny Alekseevny Oleninoi, ed. Olga Oom (Paris, 1936), 10–11.
27. Cited in David Magarshack, Pushkin: A Biography (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 217.
28. A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1970), 8:241.
29. A. S. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, translated from the Russian with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 10.
30. A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:341.
31. A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:146.
32. A. S. Pushkin to N. I. Krivtsov (February 10, 1831), Pis’ma, 3:12.
33. Pushkin, “Dnevnik,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:191.
34. A. S. Pushkin to A. Kh. Benkendorf (July 1, 1835), A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Izdatel ‘stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1949), 16:31.
35. V. G. Belinsky, Izbrannye sochineniya (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1949), 32.
36. N. I. Ivanitsky, “Vospominaniya,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:434.
37. Liberman, cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:451.
38. “Otchet o deistviyakh korpusa zhandarmov za 1837 god,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:451. There seems to be evidence of popular anger among the lower classes against foreigners in general. One testimony rather eerily foreshadows the (Soviet) future: “The whole population of Petersburg, and especially the rabble and lumpen, were agitated, as if in convulsions, passionately desiring to take revenge on d’Anthès. No one, from small to great, wanted to agree that d’Anthès was not a murderer. They wanted to make short work even of the surgeons who had treated Pushkin, trying to prove that there was conspiracy and treachery here, that one foreigner had wounded Pushkin and other foreigners had been entrusted with the task of treating him.” Stanislav Moravsky, “Vospominaniya,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:436.
39. M. I. Semevsky, “K biografii Pushkina,” cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:447.
40. Cited in Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni, 2:442.
42. A number of American Slavists have done important work on the historical development of the Pushkin cult, and this introduction is greatly indebted to their labors. Readers who would like to learn more about the subject might explore the following works: Marcus C. Levitt’s thoroughly researched and sharply reasoned study of the Pushkin celebration of 1880, which also briefly covers the later evolution of the Pushkin myth, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); the anthology Cultural Myths of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), which contains an excellent selection of articles by leading scholars on Pushkin during the Symbolist period; Paul Debreczeny’s thought-provoking reading of the history and role of the Pushkin cult to the present, “Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo: Pushkin’s Elevation to Sainthood in Soviet Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 269–92; Victor Terras’s interesting remarks on the vision of Pushkin as Russia’s national poet, “Some Observations on Pushkin’s Image in Russian Literature,” Russian Literature 14 (1983): 296–316; and Jeffrey Brooks’s seminal studies on the history of literacy in Russia: “Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics,” in Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. Ivo Banac, John G. Ackerman, and Roman Szporluk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 315–34; “Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era,” in Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, 1800–1914, ed. William Mills Todd III (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978), 150; and When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). I would also like to express my gratitude to Carol Ueland for helping out as always and allowing me to use the draft of her dissertation on Pushkin and the Symbolists.
43. N. V. Gogol, “Neskol’ko slov o Pushkine,” in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1967), 6:68. Gogol published this article in the same year that Belinsky pronounced Pushkin “dead.” Perhaps it is not without foundation to suggest that for any writer, being dead, whether literally or metaphorically, may be a necessary condition for canonization.
45. M. Yu. Lermontov, “Smert’ poeta,” in Venok Pushkinu (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1974), 31. This anthology, which tellingly opens with Pushkin’s own “Monument” poem, gives a good, although by no means exhaustive, sampling of poetry dedicated to Pushkin from his days at the lycée to the time of the book’s publication. The collection contains a number of other poems commemorating—and interpreting—Pushkin’s death, most notably Fyodor Tyutchev’s “January 29, 1837,” in which the poet equates d’Anthès with a royal assassin. Tyutchev’s poem ends with lines that might be counted among the clichés of Pushkin lore: “You, like a first love,/Russia’s heart will never forget.” Venok Pushkinu, 40.
46. This argument is developed in Debreczeny, “Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo.” Jeffrey Brooks argues in “Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature” (pp. 327–28) that the biographies of Pushkin and other Russian “classics” at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries were cast in the mold of saints’ lives to appeal to less-educated readers, who were more familiar with the conventions of the religious texts.
47. Lermontov would himself die in a duel only four years later.
48. Gogol, Sobranie sochinenii, 6:442.
49. Belinsky, “Stat’ya pyataya,” Izbrannye sochineniya, 571.
50. Belinsky, “Stat’ya vos’maya,” Izbrannye sochineniya, 635.
51. D. I. Pisarev, “Realisty,” in Sochineniya D. I. Pisareva: Polnoe sobranie v shesti tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1894), 4:113. D. I. Pisarev, “Pushkin i Belinsky,” in Sochineniya b chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1956), 3:414, 357.
52. For the details of the Pushkin jubilee, see Levitt, Russian Literary Politics. The Pushkin monument was originally erected on Tverskoi Boulevard across the street from the Strastnoi Monastery. In 1931 the site on which the statue stood was renamed Pushkin Square, and shortly thereafter the monastery was demolished and the square made larger. In 1950, the statue of Pushkin was moved across Gorky (Tverskaya) Street to its present site on the enlarged Pushkin Square.
53. For an excellent and thorough discussion of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech, see Levitt, Russian Literary Politics, 122–46. The chapter is appropriately titled “Dostoevsky ‘Hijacks’ the Celebration.”
54. Dostoevsky in fact opened with a quotation from Gogol’s “Some Words About Pushkin.”
55. F. M. Dostoevsky, “Pushkin (Ocherk),” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984), 26:146–47.
58. For details of the 1899 celebration, see Marcus C. Levitt, “Pushkin in 1899,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, 183–204.
61. The title, for example, of works by Bryusov and Marina Tsvetaeva.
62. D. Burlyuk, N. Burlyuk, A. Kruchyonykh, V. Kandinsky, B. Livshits, V. Mayakovsky, and V. Khlebnikov, Poshchyochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (Moscow, 1912).
63. These terms are from Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
64. For a more thorough account, see Robert P. Hughes, “Pushkin in Petrograd, February 1921,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, 204–13.
65. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Koleblemyi trenozhnik,” in Sobranie sochinenii, ed. John Malmstad and Robert P. Hughes (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990), 2:312.
68. Aleksandr Blok, “O naznachenii poeta,” in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, ed. V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov, and K. I. Chukovsky (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962), 6:160.
71. “Slava russkogo naroda,” Pravda, February 10, 1937:1.
72. I would like to thank Nadezhda Azhgikhina for having brought this book to my attention.
73. A. I. Gessen, Naberezhnaya moiki, 12: Poslednyaya kvartira A. S. Pushkina (Minsk: Narodnaya asveta, 1983), 7.
74. See Debreczeny, “Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo,” 282.
75. On the concluding pages of her excellent study of the cultural mythology surrounding the eighteenth-century Russian poet and translator Vasily Tredyakovsky, Irina Reyfman suggests that Pushkin should be viewed as a “trickster.” Vasily Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990): 253–54.
76. Based on a version told to me by Andrei Sinyavsky in October 1992.
77. On Pushkin places, see Stephanie Sandler, “Remembrance in Mikhailovskoe,” in Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism, 231–50.
78. Adapted from my translation of Marya Rozanova, “On the History and Geography of This Book,” Russian Studies in Literature 28, no. 1 (Winter 1991–1992): 96–97. The issue in which Rozanova’s article appears is entitled “The Return of Abram Tertz: Siniavskii’s Reception in Gorbachev’s Russia” and contains translations of a selection of articles on the controversy over Strolls with Pushkin. For a more thorough discussion of the attacks on Sinyavsky’s work in both the emigration and Russia, see Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Sinyavsky’s ‘Return’ to the Soviet Union,” Formations 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 24–44, and Stephanie Sandler’s excellent discussion in “Sex, Death and Nation in the Strolls with Pushkin Controversy,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 294–308.
79. Roman Gul, “Progulki khama s Pushkinym,” Novy zhurnal 24 (1976): 118.
80. Ibid., 126, 128, 120 (Gul’s emphasis).
82. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “…Koleblet tvoi trenozhnik,” Vestnik russkogo khristyanskogo dvizheniya 142 (1984): 152.
83. Ernst Safonov, editor of the newspaper Literary Russia (Literaturnaya Rossiya), where many of the Soviet attacks on Sinyavsky were published, cited from a taped transcript of a meeting with seven russophile writers and critics held at Columbia University on May 10, 1990. The group was visiting the United States under the auspices of the United States Information Agency.
84. “Moyus’, moyus’ po pushkinym mestam.” I would like to express my gratitude to Greta Slobin for having told me this joke. Other commentators have identified this as a Lenin joke (“my Lenin places”), which reveals the kinship between the Lenin and Pushkin cults. See Debreczeny, “Zhitie Aleksandra Boldinskogo.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES ON STROLLS WITH PUSHKIN
1. The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. The harem (one so wants to get into). Byron. Byron’s Juan, who got there by dressing up as a maiden. The caped uhlan, who followed in his footsteps (rereading The Little House in Kolomna, I for some reason did not find in it the above-mentioned uhlan, who was shaving disguised as a female cook, but all the same it seems that there was an uhlan). So the uhlan, in imitation of Byron,* (The comparison with Byron is quite natural here since The Fountain of Bakhchisarai is one of the “Byronic” poems written by Pushkin in the early 1820s. Sinyavsky refers to the episode in Byron’s Don Juan in which Juan dresses as a woman and steals into a Turkish harem. We find a similar situation in Pushkin’s poem The Little House in Kolomna [1830], where a man pretends to be a female cook in order to get a job at the house of the woman he wishes to seduce. The mistress discovers the deception when she sees him shaving, after which he flees the house. Sinyavsky is quite right that there is no uhlan in the poem. Quoting from memory, he probably confused The Little House in Kolomna with Lermontov’s “The Tambov Treasurer’s Wife,” written, according to Lermontov himself, in imitation of Pushkin’s Little House in Kolomna and Count Nulin. There is indeed an uhlan in the Lermontov poem. This one is after the flirtatious wife of the town’s treasurer. He wins her in a card game and flees with her at the end of the poem.) stole his way to Parasha’s side—just as Pushkin, by the same Byronic path, in The Fountain of Bakhchisarai stole into the harem, dressed in feminine stanzas. “She is enchanting and capricious, like a southern beauty,” A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) wrote of the poem in a review of contemporary literature (Polar Star,* [A literary almanac published by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and Kondraty Ryleev in 1823–1825 in St. Petersburg. The publication was distinguished by its clearly defined expression of the political and ideological views of the Decembrists and by its tendency to unite all the progressive forces of the epoch, publishing works by Pushkin and other important writers of the period. Yearly critical surveys of Russian literature by Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, published under the rubric “A View of the Old and the New Literature in Russia,” defined the journal’s ideological bent.] 1825), without pausing to think, however, of the resemblance between Pushkin’s fountain and a woman. But we will think about it….
2. “And the hero had a prophetic dream…”
3. “I had awful dreams!…”
4. “And Tatyana had a wonderful dream…”
5. “Always the same dream! Is it possible? For the third time!”
6. “I had a dream, which I could never forget and in which to this day I see something prophetic, when I think of the strange circumstances of my life in relation to it.”
7. “Not in vain, not accidentally,/Was life given to me by God,” the hairsplitting Metropolitan Filaret*(Filaret, the metropolitan of Moscow, was an educated man respected for his eloquence even by Pushkin. He published his poem in the almanac Northern Flowers in 1830 as a response to Pushkin’s. Retaining almost entirely the form of the Pushkin poem, Filaret changed the text slightly, adding a religious note to the poet’s words: life is given to us not accidentally and not in vain, without God’s will life would perish, and the poet is responsible for the way he lives his life.) corrected Pushkin’s mistakes. Pushkin sighed in contrition, repented, hesitated, and held his ground. The circles of poetry and religion did not coincide at the time.
8. He wrote to Vyazemsky of Zhukovsky (May 25, 1825): “I am not his heir but his pupil, and I have only that advantage that I don’t intrude on his road but wander along a side road.”
9. See the fragment “Why does the wind whirl in the ravine,” in which a similar series of associations—between winds, maidens, moons, etc.—ends in the poet.
10. But Jenny will not abandon
Edmund even in the heavens!
11. We sometimes discover a similar layout in lines which are integrated into a broader context and pitched like a tent with the help of opposing vectors:
…the magician makes a great effort, wheezes
And suddenly soars away with Ruslan…
His ardent steed follows them with its eyes;
The magician is already under the clouds;
The hero is hanging by his beard…
Follow the angle of the horse’s gaze: the magician ascended along it; but in order to keep this cartwheel, launched in a triple rotation into the sky, from disappearing from view, the author adds Ruslan, as a parodical weight:
They fly over gloomy forests,
They fly over wild mountains,
They fly over the gulf of the sea;
Growing numb from the strain,
Ruslan holds on with tenacious hand
To the villain’s beard.
12. Tatyana caught a glimpse of Onegin’s demonic past in her dream, where he was the leader of a hellish gang. The original nature of his image also shows through in “A Secluded House on Vasilevsky Island,” from which we can draw the conclusion that in his final form Onegin is a transformed, disgraced demon who, once a tempter, ended up as a victim and was turned into a person with zero meaning. It must be noted that another path from that same “Secluded House” leads to Evgeny of The Bronze Horseman.
13. This can be replaced by any other quotation, to suit the reader’s taste. For example, “Whether I wander through noisy streets…”