The Icon and the Axe

Poetry was viewed, at least until the late thirties, as the first and greatest of the art forms: "the first-born daughter of the deathless spirit, the holy hand-maiden of eternal elegance, nothing less than the most perfect harmony."84 Such flowery tributes seem not altogether inappropriate; for the 1,820's and 1830's were the golden age of Russian verse. In the quantity of good poetry and the quality of its best, Russia drew equal to any other nation of Europe and far ahead of anything in its own past. The greatest of all, Alexander Pushkin, represents in poetry what his ill-fated Decembrist friends represented in politics: the final flowering of eighteenth-century aristocratic aspiration. But, whereas the Decembrists came to an inglorious end and had little impact on subsequent political thought, Pushkin was lionized even in his lifetime, and sounded forth many of the themes that were to dominate a rich literary culture in the late imperial period. His extraordinary success helped attract gifted Russians to art as a kind of alternative to politics during the reactionary period that followed the crushing of the Decembrists.

From a background of privilege and a largely French, neo-classical education at the newly founded imperial lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin grew continually in the range and depth of his interests. Within his relatively brief life of thirty-eight years, he wrote plays, stories, and poems with equal facility about a wide variety of times and places. His most influential work was the "novel in verse" Eugene Onegin. Its portrayal of provincial aristocratic life and its muted tale of unfulfillment made it "the real ancestor of the main line of Russian fiction," while "superfluous" Onegin and the

lovely Tatiana became "the authentic Adam and Eve of the Mankind that inhabits Russian fiction."85 One of his last poems, The Bronze Horseman, is probably the greatest ever written in the Russian language. A much shorter and more intense work than Onegin, The Bronze Horseman struck a resonant chord in the Russian apocalyptical mentality with its central image of a flood descending on St. Petersburg without any ark of salvation. Drawing on his own memories of the flood in 1824, Pushkin transforms Falconet's bronze statue of Peter the Great into an ambiguous symbol of imperial majesty and inhuman power. The clerk Eugene, in whose final delirium the statue comes to life, became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction-pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone control.

Pushkin remains the outstanding illustration of Russian aristocratic culture. In his hands, Russian poetry came close to Nadezhdin's ideal synthesis of classical and romantic elements; the Russian language attained an elegance and precision that was at last devoid of affectation; and the famous "broad Russian nature" was combined with the classical virtues of clarity and disciplined moderation. For all his breadth of interest and subject matter, Pushkin was a different temperament from the Shakespeare with whom Russians often compare him. His was not the "golden uncontrolled enfranchisement" of the Elizabethans but rather the fulfillment of the oft-maligned aristocratic ideal: disinterested curiosity freed from dilettantism; ranging sympathies freed from condescension; and honest self-awareness freed from morbid introspection.

For a poet with natural musicality, it seems appropriate that Pushkin wrote about music and musicians and had so much of his own work adapted for the musical stage.86 There is a kind of compatibility between the grace of his verse and that of the imperial ballet, which by the 1820's had surpassed all others in Europe. During thirty of Pushkin's thirty-eight years thjs^aUet was directed by Charles Didelot, the first of the great Russian impresario-choreo^apHeTsTHe^mkeTplishkin's work, and Pushkin found fresh inspiration for his poetry in one of Didelot's greatest ballerinas, Istomina.87 The verses of Pushkin and the movements of Istomina gave Russians a new confidence that they were capable of surpassing the West not only in primitive combat but also in sophisticated cultural accomplishment.

For all his genius and symbolic importance, however, Pushkin did not affect the path of Russian cultural development as much as many lesser writers.

He exerted, it is true, a vast influence on Russian literature, but almost none on the history of Russian thought, of Russian spiritual cul-

ture. In me mneteenm century ana generally ?? oui own umcs, rvussiau thought and spiritual culture has followed another, non-Pushkinian path.88