Pushkin on Poetry

Poetry by its nature, when at its highest and most free, should have no aim except itself.

'Eugene Onegin' 5 Translations and A Commentary Part 1

Translators are the post horses of Enlightenment.
Pushkin


Part 1
5 Translations

The rhyming and metrical format of Onegin declare that it is a historical work.
Stanley Mitchell

It’s as if a sound proof wall separated Pushkin’s poetic novel from the English-reading world. There is a whole magic which goes by default: the touching lyrical beauty, the cynical wit of the poem, the psychological insight, the devious narrative skill, the thrilling, compulsive grip of the novel, the tremendous gusto and swing and panache of the whole performance.
Charles Johnston

Confronted with an evident inability to render a work faithfully in either its absolute form or its total sense… the only solution it seems to me is for the translator to try to view the work not as a hopeless dichotomy but as unified whole and to try to be faithful, in some mysterious spirit, to this vision of wholeness.
James E. Falen.

I would say that poetry translation is the art of poetic lie-sense.
Douglas Hofstadter



The history of translations of Eugene Onegin in English may be divided into two periods: pre- and post Nabokov, whose translation of 1964 rises like a peak between them. The first period includes Deutsch, Elton with Briggs, Radin and Patrick, and Spalding; and the second period, those translators who came after Nabokov and therefore had the benefit of his scholarship and modern translation theories: Arndt, Kayden, Johnston, Falen, Hofstadter, and Mitchell. A comparison of these last 4 post-Nabokov translations along with the version by Nabokov illuminates the difficulties of translating this great Russian masterpiece into English. At the same time it also raises essential questions about the nature of verse translation.
To help us in our comparison we will use the model devised by Nabokov himself. In his introduction to his translation of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov identifies three kinds of translation. Briefly summarized they are as follows:

1. paraphrastic In this type, Into Language dominates, and Out of Language is sacrificed. Some paraphrastic translations are more faithful to the original, while others are very far from it.

2. lexical In this type, Out of Language dominates and Into Language is sacrificed. The result reads like a machine translation, with Into Language taking on the syntactical properties of Out of Language.

The paraphrastic and lexical types may be seen as opposite ends of a spectrum.

3. literal In this type, an ideal only rarely and fleetingly achieved, both languages are perfectly balanced, and sacrifices and compromises are kept to a minimum.

Now let’s apply this model to three broad elements of language: syntax, lexical fields, and lexical distribution, especially focusing on how, in their search for a perfect compromise between the demands of meaning and the demands of finding English rhymes, translators add or subtract or substitute language present in the Russian verse.

Let’s focus in depth on one stanza, one of the most beautiful from Canto 6, in which, prompted by Lensky’s death in the duel, the narrator reflects on the early death of a poet and what is lost to the world thereby.


Perhaps for the world’s good
Or, at least, for glory, he was born;
His silenced lyre
A resonant, uninterrupted ringing 4
In centuries might have aroused. The poet,
Perhaps, upon the stairway of the world,
Had a high stair awaiting him.
His martyred shade, 8
Perhaps, had borne away with it
A sacred mystery, and for us
A life-creating voice has perished,
And past the tomb’s confines 12
Will not rush up to it the hymn of races,
The benediction of the times.

Eugene Onegin Canto 6 Stanza 37
trans: Vladimir Nabokov 1964


Although Nabokov is loudly convinced that this is a perfect literal translation (type 3), an equal balance of Into and Out Of, his version is in fact closer to type 2, a word-for-word lexical transcoding, according to his own model. English poesy, grace, beauty, even conventional syntax, are sacrificed for an exact rendition of Russian lexis and syntax. Iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme of the Onegin Stanza have been done away with and replaced with a kind of lumpy prose whose syntax is unnatural and whose meaning is sometimes a bit bizarre. Nabokov had a habit -increasingly so in his later translation years- of placing the prepositional phrases between subject and verb, a highly unnatural position in English, but one that is natural to Russian; one wonders how exactly does a hymn rush up a stairway; and why the tautology of resonant ringing? However, in keeping with his stated aim, we can be sure from Nabokov’s pony, that in the Russian perhaps appears three times in the stanza at the beginning of lines 1, 6 and 9; that there is a caesura in line 5; that the strange un-English word order of lines 3 through 5 exactly replicates the lexical distribution of Russian in the same lines; that the stanza consists of three sentences ending on lines 5, 7 and 14; that the word benediction comes before times in line 14 and not vice versa, and so on. We can also be absolutely sure of the specific lexical field (consisting of the terms lyre, stairway, hymn, martyr, shade, mystery, tomb, benediction and time) used in the construction of the metaphor which runs through the stanza. Nabokov’s lexical translation gives the non-Russian reader the most reliable version in terms of how the language of the original works. This version can be used as check for other versions in terms of linguistic closeness to the Russian. However, in skewering the heart of the stanza with the needle of his accuracy, he has also robbed it of life.


Perhaps he was for good intended
Or at the very least for fame;
His silenced lyre might have extended
Its sound through centuries to come 4
With ringing music. There awaited
Perhaps a special niche created
For him at an exalted site.
Perhaps his martyred shade in flight 8
Carried away a holy secret,
Remaining with him, and the joys
Are lost of an uplifting voice,
While from beyond the gravestone’s remit 12
No hymn will rush to where he’s laid,
Nor peoples come to bless his shade.

trans: Stanley Mitchell 2008


Mitchell’s version comes closer to a literal translation (type 3 in Nabokov’s own typology of translations) in which the aim of a perfect balance between the two languages is more nearly achieved. Rhythm and rhyme have been preserved without disturbing the lexical distribution of Nabokov’s pony: perhaps is repeated in the same places; the caesura is in the same place in line 5; the three sentences end in the same places; most of the lexis is in the same place (silence in line 3 martyred in line 8 etc); most of the lexical substitutions are near enough synonymous: holy secret- sacred mystery, benediction-bless (Nabokov would no doubt deplore the substitution of gravestone for tomb and write 3000 words on the difference). The chief deviation from the Russian is in the slight change to the lexical field and the resultant metaphor: the stairway has been replaced with a niche in an unspecified high place. Apart from this, it seems to be a miracle of faithfulness to the original, (as seen through the lense of Nabokov’s pony) with the addition of rhythm and rhyme: a perfect compromise between the linguistic demands of the form and meaning of both languages. It has all the appearance of poetry. And yet, the meaning seems to be packed too densely into the lines to give it space to breathe; and some of the word choices sound prosaic to this reader’s ear: extended, niche, remit, site are ugly workaday words that do not resonate or sing. Mitchell’s literal version is very faithful to the language of the Russian, and a poetic and naturally readable version in English.


Perhaps to improve the world’s condition,
perhaps for fame, he was endowed;
his lyre, now stilled, in its high mission
might have resounded long and loud 4
for aeons. Maybe it was fated
that on the world’s staircase there waited
for him a lofty stair. His shade
after the martyr’s price it paid 8
maybe bore off with it for ever
a secret truth, and at our cost
a life creating voice was lost;
to it the people’s blessing never 12
will reach, and past the tomb’s compound
hymns of the ages never sound.

trans: Charles Johnston 1977


Johnston’s version takes more liberties with the text and is therefore a paraphrastic (type 1) version. Although the caesura in line 5 has been kept, and the three sentences end in the same lines, an extra caesura has been added in line 7. Lexical distribution is more or less the same as the original, with stilled substituting for silence in line 3, and martyred in line 8. But tomb (12) and hymn (13) in the original have here switched lines. Lexical substitutions include staircase for stairway, truth for mystery, but these are near enough synonymous. The tomb’s compound, substituted for the tomb’s confines, is an ugly anachronistic image, the word compound suggesting a Soviet style death camp. An extra perhaps has been added to line 2, making four in total, rather than the original’s three, and the perhaps on line 6 has been moved to line 5. The biggest and most jarring addition is the metaphor of price and cost (lines 8 – 10) which is not present in the Russian. Some of the rhymes are not very felicitous; the unfortunate endowed of line 2 introduces an image of Lensky that I would prefer not to glimpse, and the lines are uncapitalised. Johnston’s version is closer to type 1 than Mitchell’s, a paraphrase, in Nabokov’s typology, (and no doubt Nabokov would deplore it for that reason). Although the sacrifices made to the Russian in favour of the English form have been kept to a minimum, as English poetry, however, it is rather inept and not very convincing.


Or maybe he was born to fire
The world with good, or earn at least
A gloried name; his silenced lyre
Might well have raised, before it ceased, 4
A call to ring throughout the ages.
Perhaps upon the world’s great stages
He might have scaled a lofty height.
His martyred shade, condemned to night 4
Perhaps has carried off forever
Some sacred truth, a living word,
Now doomed by death to pass unheard;
And in the tomb his shade shall never 12
Receive our race’s hymns of praise,
Nor hear the ages bless his days.

trans: James E. Falen 1990


Falen’s version (also type 1) takes even more greater liberties with the Russian in favour of a more resonant and sonorous, vowel-laden English stanza which still reproduces all the structural features of the Onegin Stanza, but on English ground, not Russian. One perhaps has been replaced with a synonym and moved; the caesura in 5 has been moved to 3; some totally new images not found in the Russian have been introduced: fire, night, a living word; and substitution has changed other images: stairway- stages, centuries- ages. However, for these additions and substitutions, words have been chosen which have a totemic, universally archetypal quality, (a quality not present in Mitchell’s niche and site or Johnston’s compound). They are, moreover, also entirely in keeping with the common topoi of European Romanticism; and do not jar. As well as end-of-line rhymes, Falen has found internal echoes of rhyme (and metre) on certain vowels: scaled in line 7 with shade in line 8; race’s in line 13 with ages in line 14 (the /ei/ sound predominates throughout the stanza); a pattern of monophthongs and diphthongs is very sensitively rendered and creates an elegiac quality. In the first quatrain Falen explores the ambiguity of masculine or feminine endings on fire and lyre, unlike Mitchell’s more clearly feminine but deadening intended and extended. Falen’s version is more paraphrastic than Johnston’s even, but still retains some faithfulness to the Russsian lexical field and its syntactical distribution. His additions and substitutions are entirely in keeping with the mood and emotion of the original. Falen’s great strength is in his creation of a convincing poetic artifact in English.


Perhaps for goodness’ sake, or glory’s,
Vladimir Lensky, bard, was born;
His silenced lyre perchance hid stories
Untold, which through his magic horn
Blown sweetly, might have mad men gladder.
Some high-ranked rung on fame’s tall ladder
Perhaps awaited him. Perchance
His suffering shade’s deep mystic dance 8
Lies buried with him; thus for us is
Forever lost a vibrant voice.
To thank him would have been our choice,
But our mere mortals chants and fusses 12
Can’t reach across death’s mystic pale:
Our hymns we’d sing to no avail.

trans: Douglas Hofstadter 1999


Hofstadter’s version is the most paraphrastic (type1), an imitation rather than a translation, Nabokov would no doubt say. The meaning, language elements and mood of the Russian have been almost entirely sacrificed to the demands of a contemporary, idiosyncratic American English and a highly personalised vision and reading of the poem. Enormous liberties have been taken with lexical field, and its distribution. Perhaps on line 9 has been moved to line 7, and an extra perchance has been added which is not there in the original; Lensky’s tomb has become death’s mystic pale; the stairway of the world has become a rather precarious and penny- pinching ladder; the hymns of races have become superstitious chants and atheistic fusses. New images have been introduced which blur the clarity of the metaphor and risk rendering the mood of the stanza ridiculous, unlike Falen’s new images, which reinforce the metaphor running through the stanza, and heighten its archetypal quality. In Hofstadter’s version the poet’s name and occupation have been given, perhaps for the benefit of a celestial clerk, while poor Lensky’s ghost seems to have his hands full with a lyre and a horn while he clings precariously to the ladder, dancing. No rest for the wicked there then. Some of the rhymes, while reproducing accurately the Onegin Stanza, are most infelicitous: the gladder/ladder rhyme suggests that the antics of Lensky’s harassed shade might make men madder; the first for goodness sake has a touch of the exasperated about it; while line 11 has nothing to do with anything except to provide the necessary rhyme for voice in 10.

Of course it might be unfair to judge the whole work on the strength of one stanza. However, taken as a whole, Nabokov’s pony is a tough little beast, capable of carrying loads and working hard, but without verve or grace; neither poetry nor good English prose: an excellent reference, but ultimately unreadable.

Taken on mass, throughout the whole length of the poem, Mitchell’s dense stanzas and highly specific lexical fields, paradoxically give the most novelistic rendering of this verse novel. Mitchell’s highly readable and engaging translation situates the work within the tradition of the Russian realist/psychological novel, which it indeed helped to engender. Mitchell’s introductory essay and translator’s note are superbly informative, often provoking, and excellently expressed.

Johnston’s workmanlike paraphrase imposes an unfaithful uniformity on the work. In his version, Pushkin’s wild swerves of tone have all been ironed out in favour of a consistency of tone, lexically close to the original, with all the features of the Onegin Stanza in place, but without Mitchell’s density: self effacing and a touch bland. It might be too obvious to mention Johnston’s previous career as a diplomat in this connection. Both Johnston and Mitchell’s alterations are frequently anachronistic and jar.

Taken as a whole, Hofstadter’s modern colloquialisms clash clumsily against the text’s references to Horace and Tasso; they feel crass next to the poem’s Romantic sensibility. Hofstadter believes that as Pushkin’s Russian was the Russian of his contemporaries, a contemporary translation should therefore also be in contemporary English, surprisingly faulty reasoning for an author who won a Pulitzer for his book on the great artistic logicians Bach, Godel and Escher. He maintains in his introduction, comparing his version with Falen's: where he is lyrical, I’m jazzy, where he’s legato, I’m staccato, where he’s flowing, I’m percussive, where he’s subtly seasoned, I’m saucy and spicy, in other words, a joke; and a text book example of what Nabokov and Pushkin would have called poshlost.

Falen’s translation is how one might imagine the work to have been written in English if Pushkin had been an Englishman. It has the elegiac lyricism of Keats, the political anger of Shelley, the clarity of Wordsworth’s metaphysical meditations, Blake’s mysticism and prophetic power, the detailed (but highly derivative from the French) pastoralism of Grey and Thomson, spiced throughout with Byron’s satirical elan and verbal wit. Moreover, it manages to echo these various intonations without ever succumbing to parody. Falen’s version situates the work firmly within the English Romantic tradition, as is only right for a work composed in the 1820s, and turns Pushkin’s Russian into a song of equal beauty in English.

Of these 5 translations, Nabokov’s may be referred to, Johnston’s may be overlooked, Hofstadter’s may be ignored. Mitchell’s may be studied, and Falen’s may be learnt by heart and recited with reverence and love. Of the difference between these last two, it may be safely said that Mitchell is the better writer, Falen the better poet.


Part 2: A Commentary coming soon...

"Eugene Onegin" Alexander Pushkin

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
George Eliot
Adam Bede

Tatyana, in her low cut gown,
Steps out of doors and trains a mirror
Upon the moon to bring it nearer.

Eugene Onegin V. 9. 4-6

The hour of fate has struck at last
The poet stops and silently his pistol drops.

Eugene Onegin VI.30 13-14


Pushkin is to the Russian language and culture what Shakespeare is to the English; and Eugene Onegin is his masterpiece, the central work of Russian literature, from which all other works have their genesis. Composed between 1823 and 1831 (a period of seven years, four months and seventeen days, as calculated by Pushkin himself), this novel in verse has been retained in the memory of all literate Russians, and has exercised an incalculable influence on subsequent Russian poets and novelists. Most readers know how Pushkin’s death in a duel at the age of 38 is prefigured strangely in the novel by the death of his character, the poet Lensky, in a duel. In modern criticism, looking for connections between the author and their work is regarded as naïve, passé and ideologically suspect. However, like Eliot’s Egyptian sorcerer, and Tatyana using her mirror to find the face of her future lover in the moon, mirrors and books have been used since they were invented, as mediums for divination and seeing. In this case, the composition of Eugene Onegin was so intimately tied up with Pushkin’s circumstances; and its final form bears such striking similarities with Pushkin’s fate, that the book may be seen as a mirror of the poet’s life and death. It is so full of the most strange and haunting coincidences and foreshadowings, that it is possible to regard it as a mirror into the future, a fatidic dream book for the divination of omens and signs.

Let’s begin by looking at the building blocks of the poem/novel. The poem consists of eight chapters, or cantos, containing varying numbers of stanzas. The Onegin Stanza, as it is called, invented by Pushkin himself for the purposes of this novel, consists of 118 syllables arranged in 14 lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming ababeecciddiff (vowels represent feminine rhymes -the last syllable of the line is unstressed, and consonants represent masculine rhymes -the last syllable of the line is stressed). The stanza is in effect a sonnet, with the first three quatrains representing all the various possible combinations of four rhymes: (abab interleaved, eecc separated, iddi sandwiched), followed by a rhyming couplet, to finish the stanza with a twist or a bang, rather like the final rhyming couplets in a Shakespearian sonnet. Here is an example, the opening of canto 5 in which Pushkin describes the first snowfall of a Russian winter:

The fall that year was in no hurry,
And nature seemed to wait and wait
For winter. Then in January,
The second night, the snow fell late.
Next day as dawn was just advancing
Tatyana woke and, idly glancing,
Beheld outdoors a wondrous sight:
The roofs, the yard, the fence –all white;
Each pane a fragile patter showing;
The trees in winter silver dyed,
Gay magpies on the lawn outside,
And all the hilltops soft and glowing
With winter’s brilliant rug of snow-
The world all fresh and white below.
(trans: James Falen)

Despite – or perhaps because of – the crystalline strictness of its form, the Onegin Stanza is wonderfully flexible in Russian, allowing Pushkin to build blocks of meaning within or across the different quatrains inside the stanza. The Onegin Stanza liberated Russian poetry from foreign structures – especially French, which was the language of government and literature in the Russia of the time - creating a form that was as intrinsically Russian as iambic pentameter is intrinsically English and iambic hexameter intrinsically Greek, and which, for the first time, gave the Russian language new flexibility and strength. Prince Mirsky writes of the Onegin Stanza: it depends on the adequacy of rhythm to intonation and on the complex texture of sound. Pushkin’s style is Byronic: witty, elegant, lightly satirical, charming. The first canto buzzes and fizzes like champagne, but the style gradually darkens and mellows like red wine, until the last canto contains moving reflections on the passing of youth and aging.

Into these stanzas Pushkin packs the whole of Russian life: peasant children blowing on their fingers to keep them warm, balls and theatres in St Petersburg, the churches and streets of Moscow, summer gardens, meals, family gossip, the contents of a dressing table, midnight conversations with his old nanny, digressions on the beauty of feet of Russian girls, the classical influence on contemporary poetry, the state of the roads, libraries and books…and dreams and divinations. The story concerns 5 characters: Onegin, the hero, a Petersburg dandy; his young friend, Lensky, a poet; Lensky’s fiancée, Olga; Olga’s sister, Tatyana, who falls in love with Onegin, and who is spurned by him; and ‘Pushkin’ himself, a friend of Onegin, who relates the events after they have happened.

Nabokov called the 8 cantos a ‘colonnade’, but they are more like a mirror, in which the first half of the poem/novel is reflected in the second half. The first word and the last word of the whole piece are the same. Cantos 1 and 8 are set in St Petersburg, cantos 2 and 7 have material set in Moscow, cantos 3 and 6 focus on the beginning and tragic end of the relationship between Onegin and his friend Lensky, and cantos 4 and 5 focus on the relationships between Onegin and Tatyana, and Lensky and Olga. The whole book, therefore, acts as a mirror of itself. The mirror line of the novel, its mathematical heart, the exact halfway point of its total of 5523 iambic lines –whether by design or coincidence- is this:
Mysteriously all objects/Foretold her something (Nabokov)
All objects either scared or charmed her/With secret meanings they’d impart (Falen)
Some mundane sight would set her fretting/Foretelling secretly some fact (Hofstadter)
All objects held a secret content/Proclaiming something to be guessed (Mitchell)
Each object held a secret message /For her instruction (Johnston)
EO V.5 6-7
suggesting to the bibliomancer that the book holds the secret of Pushkin’s death. Canto 5, in which this strange kernel is placed, is packed with instances of divination, fortune telling, and prediction, a kind of catalogue of Russian soothsaying techniques: a cat on the stove foretells visitors, a hare crossing the road is bad luck, as is seeing the moon over the left shoulder and encountering a priest in a doorway; methods for fortune telling adumbrated in the canto include pouring boiling wax into water and telling the future from the shapes made thereby; gazing at the moon with a mirror; sleeping with a mirror under the pillow; drawing rings from a bag; singing old peasant songs. Tatyana and her nurse plan to spend the whole night before Tatyana’s name day locked in the bath house ‘conjuring’, but Tatyana chickens out at the last minute and goes to bed, where she has a strange dream, which foretells in uncanny detail the events of the next day. After her dream, Tatyana consults the dream book of Martyn Zadek, a personage whom Pushkin tells us ironically in a note is a worthy person who never wrote divinatory books, and who, according to Nabakov was the pseudonym of an anonymous writer whose dream books were very popular all over Europe during the late 18th century. At any rate, an image of bibliomancy takes place at the center of the novel.

Tatyana’s dream has the same relationship to the events of her name day party and the subsequent duel, as Eugene Onegin has to the subsequent events of Pushkin’s life. Both the dream and the book are products of (subconscious) fantasy, and portray a preoccupation with the workings of fate; both weirdly foretell the future; both contain alignments of details which can be regarded either as uncanny coincidences or as vatic signs if the interpreter but knows how to read them. This may not be a valid method of literary criticism, but it’s worth remembering that Pushkin himself was very superstitious and a strong believer in the power of fate and omens. He had the habit of dating his poems not with the date they were composed but with dates that had personal significance for him. For example, his poem The Prophet was dated September 8th 1826, the date of his first meeting with Tsar Nicholas 1st, a highly significant encounter for Pushkin’s life. The first draft of the first stanza of Eugene Onegin is dated May 9th 1823, which was the anniversary of the date on which he was expelled from St Petersburg and sent into exile. He once took a long and inconvenient detour on his travels through Russia because a hare had crossed his path; he was a compulsive gambler, especially of card games which involved chance rather than skill or strategy; and most importantly for his reputation among his ordinary readers, he had a great love, respect and belief in the traditional superstitions of the Russian people.

Let’s look at some of these correspondences in more detail, focussing first on Pushkin’s duel, and the duel in canto 6.
➢ Lensky spends the night before the duel composing verses and reading them out, Like Delvig at a drunken feast says stanza 20. Delvig, who was Pushkin’s oldest and closest boyhood friend, had died on exactly the same day as the fictional Lensky -January 14th (but in 1831- Canto 6 was written in 1826 and is set in 1821).
➢ The wake that Pushkin and his friends held for Delvig took place on 27 January, the day of Pushkin’s own fatal duel, but 6 years prior to it.
➢ The pistols used in the Onegin-Lensky duel –manufactured by Lepage (EO VI.25.12)- were the same make as the pistols used in Pushkin’s duel. On the morning of 27th January 1837, once it was clear that the duel would go ahead at 4.30 that afternoon, Pushkin’s second had rushed out into the streets to find a pair of pistols he could borrow. The only ones he could find at such short notice were also by Lepage.
➢ As he was leaving the house to go to the duel, Pushkin noticed that the temperature had dropped. Uncharacteristically ignoring the Russian superstition that it is ill-omened to recross the threshold at the start of a journey, Pushkin returned to the house to get a thicker overcoat.
➢ While the seconds were priming the pistols, they realised the only paper they had with them to wad the balls was a lottery ticket.
➢ D’Anthes, Pushkin’s opponent, fired first, just as Pushkin was raising his pistol to take aim, exactly how Lensky is felled by Onegin in the novel.
➢ Both poets lay bleeding into the snow in a cold January.

Now, whether one believes these to be startling coincidences or signs fatefully but unconsciously placed by Pushkin’s prescient genius into his masterpiece, the fatidic parallels between art and life continue. One of the great mysteries of Pushkin’s final duel (he fought 4 altogether in his life) is why he did eventually fight it. There is not space here to go into the details surrounding the duel, the reasons for it, the withdrawal and reissue of the challenge, but, suffice it to say that Pushkin’s friends and contemporaries were, and subsequent commentators, including Akhmatova, have been puzzled by the way Pushkin himself insisted on going through with it, almost suicidally, even when a way out consistent with the demands of honour had been offered.

Again, Eugene Onegin provides portents, if we look at the wider correspondences between the poem and Pushkin’s life. In canto 6 after Lensky’s death, the narrator, ‘Pushkin’ (writing in 1826 about 1821) meditates on the loss of a young poet, and what might have been. Two alternatives are offered. First, the narrator laments what might have been lost to the world by the death of a poet in the very springtime of his life and song, assuming that this gift would have continued:

It may be he was born to fire
The world with good, or earn at least
A gloried name; his silenced lyre
Might well have raised, before it ceased,
A call to ring throughout the ages…
His martyred shade perhaps has carried off forever
Some sacred truth, a living word…
(EO VI.37. All following translations by James Falen)

The second alternative hints that, perhaps, had the poet grown old, his gift might have deserted him:

Or maybe he was merely fated
To live amid the common tide;
And as his years of youth abated,
The flame within him would have died.
In time he might have changed profoundly
Have quit the muses, married soundly…
(EO VI.39.)

A few stanzas later, ‘Pushkin’ confesses that, like this second alternative to Lensky’s fate, he feels the poetic gift leaving him:

The years to solemn prose incline me
The years chase playful rhyme behind me
And I –alas- I must confess-
Pursue her now a good deal less.
My pen has lost its disposition
To mar the fleeting page with verse
(EO VI.43.)
in a self-identification with Lensky. This is in fact what happened to Pushkin: towards the end of his life, after his ill-fated marriage, he did stop writing poetry and turn to prose, writing short stories, tales, a history of the Pugachev rebellion, a historical novel, and criticism for his journal The Contemporary. He also spent much time in the state archives researching a biography of Peter the Great, which was never started. None of these projects was well received by the public; and indeed, as the 1830s wore on, Pushkin and his circle of ‘gentlemen poets’ came to be regarded as yesterday’s men by the younger generation of more socially aware critcs and writers such as Polevoy, Nadezhdin, and the Moscow Schellingians. Poetry ceased to play an important role in Russian literature (until it was revived again at the turn of the century), and prose took over.
The narrator goes on:

Oh dreams! Where has your sweetness vanished?
And where has youth (glib rhyme) been banished?
Can it be true, its bloom has passed,
Has withered, withered now at last?
Can it be true, my heyday’s ended-
All elegiac play aside-
That now indeed my spring has died
(As I in jest so oft pretended)?
And is there no return of youth?
Shall I be thirty soon, in truth?

And so life’s afternoon has started…..
(EO VI.44.5-45.1)

Two things are important here. First, to be sure, mourning lost dreams of youth is a poetic topos common in most European Romantic poetry, and there is no doubt that these stanzas are employing this conventional topos. On the other hand, the text deliberately divorces itself from this conventionality and signals the sincerity of the emotion three times, once by an ironic reference to the glib rhyme, and then in the line All elegiac play aside, and then in the parenthetical: as I in jest so oft pretended, emphasising that this time the sentiment is not conventional, but genuine. Moreover, earlier in the poem (EO III.13) ‘Pushkin’ has drawn the same parallel between the loss of youth and the turn from poetry to prose:

Perhaps, my friends, by fate’s decree
I’ll cease one day to be a poet
When some new demon seizes me,
And scoring then Apollo’s lyre,
To humble prose I’ll bend my pen.

The second important thing to remember here, is that all these verses which appear to describe Pushkin’s sad decline were written in 1826 (or in the case of stanza 3 even earlier in 1824) when Pushkin was at the height of his poetic gift, and long before his life began to unravel. Indeed, 1830, generally regarded as the anus mirabilis of his poetic career, the year in which he produced more masterpieces than any other year of his career, lay four or five years into the future. At the point of writing these vatic lines, he was untroubled by depression, he had not even begun to think of marriage, his work was selling well, his pen was flowing, he had not yet become embroiled in the tiring and dreadfully complex financial affairs of his family, and he was the idol of the Russian reading public and a leading figure in the emerging Russian literary scene, despite his exile. There is no way he could have known how his life was to decline, how things would turn out.

In VI. 43, he says:

…sterner cares now seek admission
and mid the hum and hush of life
They haunt my soul with dreams of strife.

As the 1830s wore on, Pushkin became increasingly harrassed by debt, family cares, the flirtations of his exquisite but flighty (and expensive) wife with the Tsar and with D’Anthes. He complains frequently in his letters that he has no time or energy to write and research due to financial and family worries: For inspiration one must have spiritual tranquillity, and I am not tranquil at all, he wrote to Pletnev in 1835. He was depressed by the negative reaction to his latest works, which did not sell (unsold copies of his book on the Pugachev rebellion lay piled up in the basement of his house), and his relationship with the government –always fraught- was deteriorating. In a portrait painted by Linev in the last year of Pushkin’s life, he looks more like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: haunted, troubled and defeated; not at all like the Romanticised, Byronic hero/poet of the earlier portraits which were painted of Pushkin at the height of his career. The glorious firebird of Russian poetry had gone.

He wrote in the last stanza of the novel, in 1830, at the peak of his creativity and fame:

Blest is he who rightly gauges
The time to quit the feast and fly,
Who never drained life’s chalice dry,
Nor read its novel’s final pages;
But all at once for good withdrew…
(EO VIII.51)

Perhaps a duel, regarded as a form of self murder by the Orthodox Church, seemed to Pushkin a suitable and opportune end to all his troubles. Perhaps he preferred to lie quietly in the tomb like Lensky, visited in homage by readers, leaving his verses to posterity. Perhaps he saw it was time to quit the feast and fly; and perhaps the prophetic gift of his younger days knew this would transpire and warned him in the crystal stanzas of his greatest work.

Oh many, many days have fled
Since young Tatyana with her lover,
As in a misty dream at night,
First floated dimly into sight-
And I as yet could not uncover
Or through the magic crystal see
My novel’s shape, or what would be.
(EO VIII. 50. 8-14)

The interaction of people and books is a strange thing.
Alexander Herzen

Pushkin on his art

I write for myself, but I publish for money.

Pushkin on happiness

I am an atheist of happiness. I don't believe in it.