I fell in love with Alexander Pushkin as a teenager, smitten with his great novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin, a moral tale about arrogance and ennui disarmed — too late, alas! — by love. Russian literature, with its philosophical moodiness and combination of optimism and hopelessness, is like literary grapefruit juice for a brooding teenager, quenching deep existential thirst with a bittersweet acidic tang. And while the books that grab you by the throat when you’re young often barely tug your sleeve decades later, I still love Pushkin. Rereading his complete prose in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s sprightly new translation, I’m freshly amazed by Pushkin’s liberal, incisive take on the moral repugnance and senselessness of racism and torture, and on his attitude toward women, who, as he wrote in his feminist-tinged story “Roslavlev,” “are better educated, read more, and think more than the men” — and are therefore so much wiser.
Even Pushkin’s life story remains mesmerizing: Born in 1799 to the old military aristocracy of Russian boyars on his father’s side, he was not just Russia’s greatest poet but probably its first multiracial one: His maternal grandfather was black, taken hostage from Africa — either Ethiopia, as long thought, or from what is now Cameroon, as has been recently argued — and presented to Peter the Great, who treated him as a godson and educated him as an officer. And then, of course, there’s Pushkin’s wasteful death at thirty-seven, baited into a pistol duel over his very attractive, very social wife’s honor.
Not speaking Russian, I read Pushkin in English and have compared multiple translations over the years. A new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, the tsar and tsarina of Russian translators, is cause for celebration — in part because it will draw new readers to his work, as have their vibrant renditions of the great classics of Russian prose, including nine volumes of Dostoyevsky and three of Tolstoy. Could Eugene Onegin or Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons be next?
In his introduction to Novels, Tales, Journeys, Pevear stresses the “openness and lightness” of Pushkin’s prose. He flags the stories’ straightforwardness yet notes that they are more complex than they first appear: “They are cast as local anecdotes, and are told so simply and artlessly that at first one barely notices the subtlety of their composition, the shifts in time and point of view, the reversals of expectation, the elements of parody, the ambiguity of their resolutions.”
Most of the fragments, some little more than literary doodles, are new to me, including the alluringly titled sketch “The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha.” But the real draw remains Pushkin’s only completed novel, The Captain’s Daughter; his unfinished novel, The Moor of Peter the Great; and the stories, “The Queen of Spades,” “Dubrovsky,” and The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. Taken in sum, the volume showcases Pushkin’s deliberate experimentation with various forms — epistolary, historical, romantic, folktale, society novel, ghost story, travelogue, and even a narrative from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old debutante. His narratives display a debt to European inspiration (including Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott), yet their sensibility and settings are distinctly Russian. The translators’ annotations, which appear as endnotes, reveal Pushkin’s astonishingly wide range of literary references, which include Homer, Mme. de Staël, Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and scores more. (Translations from French passages, Pushkin’s first language, are more conveniently located at the bottom of the page on which they appear.)
In the brief introduction to her translation of my well-worn Everyman edition of The Captain’s Daughter and Other Stories, Natalie Duddington wrote, “As a poet, Pushkin is untranslatable: the exquisite beauty and the austere simplicity of his verse cannot be rendered into a foreign tongue . . . But his prose has none of this poetic quality and loses but little in translation. It is vigorous and straightforward and sounds as simple and natural today as it did a hundred years ago.”
Indeed, in these pieces Pushkin himself indicates that while poetry requires inspiration, prose is a step down on the literary ladder and requires perspiration. Ivan Belkin, the fictional author of six top-notch tales about life and love in the provinces — for which Pushkin purports to serve merely as “Publisher” — explains that, while “not born to be a poet,” he was so taken with writing that he decided “to descend to prose.”
Clearly, prose is easier to translate. So it’s not surprising that a comparison of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s new edition with earlier translations — by T. Keane, Rochelle Townsend, and Natalie Duddington — reveals just minor differences: “gloomy Russia” becomes “sad Russia,” “the damned Frenchman” becomes the more humorous “that cursed moosieu.” More salient is the title of Pushkin’s frustratingly unfinished novel based on his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal: The Moor of Peter the Great instead of the more common The Blackamoor of Peter the Great or Peter the Great’s Negro. Despite the avoidance of the racial epithet, none of the ironic edge of this comment is lost in translation: “Too bad he’s a Moor, otherwise we couldn’t dream of a better suitor.”
Of Pushkin’s finished fiction, I was particularly taken with the twists and turns of “Dubrovsky,” one of his many tales of thwarted love. In this heavily plotted story, a young aristocrat goes rogue after being cheated of his inheritance by a nasty neighbor and “the bought conscience of the ink-slinging tribe.”
Love letters figure largely in Pushkin’s work, including Onegin. In “The Queen of Spades,” a ghost story about gambling and greed that’s been popularized by Tchaikovsky’s opera, Hermann’s plot to wangle the old countess’ secret to winning at cards includes disingenuous love letters to her poor, susceptible ward. The fact that they are plagiarized from German novels is a quick tipoff to his character.
The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s only completed novel, has more room for character development. Set during a bloody peasant uprising — the Pugachev rebellion of 1773, about which Pushkin also wrote a multivolume history — this action-packed narrative purports to be the memoirs of an honorable — and damned lucky — soldier whose often guileless actions are guided by his determination to save the woman he loves. Pyotr’s unlikely encounters with the impostor Pugachev add a touch of the absurd to the plot, while also showcasing Pushkin’s sympathetic munificence to a wide range of humanity. Intriguingly, this volume includes the rough draft of a chapter Pushkin omitted — wisely, as we see.
Like many of his characters, Pushkin was by turns lighthearted, touchy, volatile, rash, and self-righteous. He also shared their propensity toward womanizing and gambling. Plagued by Tsar Nicholas I’s censors, he was exiled from St. Petersburg for long stretches of his short life — which turned out to be his most productive periods. The pity is that he didn’t live to write more. The marvel is that he managed to produce such brilliant work in multiple genres, and that it has outlasted so many regimes. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s excellent new translation will help sustain that legacy for Anglophone readers.
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Sig Nordal 