Freedom From Violence and lies essays on russian Poetry and music by simon Karlinsky simon Karlinsky, early 1970s Photograph by Joseph Zimbrolt Ars Rossica Series Editor — David M. Bethea (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Boston 2013 Freedom From Violence and lies essays on russian Poetry and music by simon Karlinsky edited by robert P. Hughes, Thomas a. Koster, richard Taruskin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2013 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-158-6 On the cover: Heinrich Campendonk (1889–1957), Bayerische Landschaft mit Fuhrwerk (ca. 1918). Oil on panel. In Simon Karlinsky’s collection, 1946–2009. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Published by Academic Studies Press in 2013. 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th , 201 7 , this book will be subject to a CC - BY - NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by - nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The A ndrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative , which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open Published b y Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 I PUSHKIN AND ROMANTICISM 1. Two Pushkin Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 I. Pushkin, Chateaubriand, and the Romantic Pose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 II. The Amber Beads of Crimea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2. Fortunes of an Infanticide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3. Pushkin Re-Englished . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4. A Mystical Musicologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 5. Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky , As an Example of the Romantic Revival of the Medieval Mystery Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 6. Misanthropy and Sadism in Lermontov’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 II MODERNISM, ITS PAST, ITS LEGACY 7. Annensky’s Materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 8. Zinaida Gippius and Russian Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 9. Died and Survived . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 10. Symphonic Structure in Andrei Bely’s Pervoe svidanie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 11. The Death and Resurrection of Mikhail Kuzmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 12. Nikolai Gumilyov and Théophile Gautier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 13. An Emerging Reputation Comparable to Pushkin’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 14. Tsve taeva in English: A Review Article . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 15. A New Edition of the Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 16. New Information about the Émigré Period of Marina Tsve taeva (Based on Material from Her Correspondence with Anna Tesková) . . . . 174 17. Pasternak, Pushkin, and the Ocean in Marina Tsvetaeva’s From the Sea . . . 182 18. “Traveling to Geneva...”: On a Less-than-Successful Trip by Marina Tsve taeva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 19. Isadora Had a Taste for “Russian Love” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 20. Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Churilin, Zabolotsky, Poplavsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 21. Evtushenko and the Underground Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 III POETRY ABROAD 22. In Search of Poplavsky: A Collage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 23. Morshen, or a Canoe to Eternity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 24. Morshen after Ekho i zerkalo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 25. A Hidden Masterpiece: Valery Pereleshin’s Ariel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 26. Russian Culture in Manchuria and the Memoirs of Valery Pereleshin . . . 310 IV ON CHAIKOVSKY 27. A Review of Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait by Alexandra Orlova . . . . . . . . . 322 28. Should We Retire Chaikovsky? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 29. Man or Myth? The Retrieval of the True Chaikovsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 30. Chaikovsky and the Pantomime of Derision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346 V ON STRAVINSKY 31. The Composer’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 32. The Repatriation of Igor Stravinsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 33. Igor Stravinsky and Russian Preliterate Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376 VI ON SHOSTAKOVICH 34. “Our Destinies Are Bad” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 398 35. Taking Notes for Testimony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408 VII SONG AND DANCE 36. The Uses of Chaliapin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416 37. Russian Comic Opera in the Age of Catherine the Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 38. Contralto: Rossini, Gautier and Gumilyov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440 39. A Cultural Educator of Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 40. Opera and Drama in Ravel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486 7 Preface S imon Karlinsky (1924–2009) was a prolific and provocative scholar of modern Russian literature, music and, latterly, sexual politics. In this volume we republish a selection of his reviews and essays about poetry and music, leaving aside his even more numerous writings on Russian prose fiction, literary history, and cultural phenomena. As there are over 250 publications to his credit, including a number of full-length books, this represents no more than ten to fifteen percent of his published writing. Karlinsky taught at the University of California, Berkeley for some thirty years. His path to a scholarly career was anything but direct An only child, he was born 22 September 1924 in the Russian enclave of the Manchurian city of Harbin, where he received his primary education and developed his tastes for music and literature. 1 The family left for the United States in 1938, after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the wors- ening of conditions there. He attended high school and college in Los An- geles before enlisting in the US Army in 1944. 2 Between 1945 and 1951 he served as a Russian interpreter in occupied Berlin, not only for the Army but, after discharge from the Army, for the American military govern- ment and the office of the Control Council for Germany. 3 He spent a year (1951–52) in Paris, where he studied musical composition with Arthur Honegger at the École Normale de Musique. Subsequently he returned to Berlin, where from 1952 to 1957 he was employed again as liaison of- ficer and interpreter for the US Berlin Command. During that period he 1 Consult herein his essay entitled “Russian Culture in Manchuria and the Memoirs of Valery Pereleshin” for personal reminiscences of life in Harbin at that time, In the 1990s, SK wrote an extended memoir of the first fourteen years of his life. It remains unpublished, and is now preserved among the Simon Karlinsky Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 2 For his life in Los Angeles, see the opening pages of “In Search of Poplavsky: A Col- lage” in the present volume. 3 An episode from his life in Berlin is recounted in S. Karli [Simon Karlinsky], “My Most Durable Translation,” New Yorker , 10 October 1959. 8 Preface continued his studies under Boris Blacher at what was then the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik, and several of his scores were performed. He re- mained deeply involved in music and dance throughout his life, and the music of Chaikovsky and Stravinsky drew his particular admiration. But he ultimately decided against a composer’s career, and he came to regard that phase of his life as a closed book. To one of us, who was pestering him for a peek at his scores, he finally wrote, drolly but emphatically: As for my compositions, I’m sure you don’t want to see them. As the quotation goes, “that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” There was a cantata which Gérard Souzay was to sing in Berlin, but the concert was cancelled. Later on, an American baritone wanted to do it, but that concert was also cancelled. Ergo, one can’t fight fate. 4 And that is when his early love of literature (Russian, French, English, and in time German and Polish) came to the fore. Karlinsky received a BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, an MA from Harvard University in 1961, and a PhD in Slavic Languages and Litera- tures from UC Berkeley in 1964, where he was immediately appointed to the faculty and rapidly rose to the rank of full professor by 1967. He was twice awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. At Berkeley, he taught with great panache a wide variety of courses and seminars, including advanced language and stylistics, surveys of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, Russian Romanticism, Russian Modernism, and the history of the Russian theater and drama, as well as single-author courses on Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, and Chekhov. He retired in 1991. Karlinsky’s career as a publishing scholar was extraordinary. His first, pioneering book (his revised dissertation, written under the direction of G. P. Struve) was on Marina Tsvetaeva and appeared in 1966. This study was the product of indefatigable research into Tsvetaeva’s biography and spectacular close reading of her wildly idiosyncratic poetry. Karlinsky’s work became the cornerstone for future Tsve taeva studies well before her 4 Simon Karlinsky to Richard Taruskin, 28 August 1985, in the editor’s possession. The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta : Friar Barnardine . Thou hast committed— Barabas . Fornication? But that Was in another country, and besides The wench is dead. 9 Preface renown either in the West or in Soviet Russia. He published a second book on Tsvetaeva in 1985, now taking full advantage of the mass of research and analysis inspired by his initial study. To be reckoned among Karlinsky’s most valuable contributions, widely read inside and outside the profession, is his now-standard edition of the selected letters of Anton Chekhov (1973). He collaborated closely on the translations, and his erudite, scintillating introduction and anno- tations to the letters comprise a virtual critical biography of the writer whom he considered an exemplary human being. Other volumes under Karlinsky’s editorship were signposts in the English-language reception of Russian émigré literature, a phenomenon that he knew at first hand. He coedited a two-volume issue of the journal TriQuarterly in 1974 devoted to Russian literature and culture in the West, which was republished in 1977 as The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922–1972 . His editorial work was decisive and his contributions therein included introductions, articles, commentary, and translations. The commanding figure for him was Vladimir Nabokov (long before his fame as an English novelist), about whom Karlinsky wrote frequently and discerningly. His edition of the Russian writer’s correspondence with the American critic Edmund Wilson, The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (1979; German expanded edition, 1995; revised and expanded, Dear Bun- ny, Dear Volodya , 2001), was widely hailed. Meanwhile , The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol had been published in 1976 and had provoked a storm of controversy over its assertion of the reflection of repressed homosexuality in the writer’s life and work. This study signaled a series of articles, reviews, translations, and conference appearances on the role of sexuality in art, homosexual themes, and queer theory that were at the time almost unprecedented in the study of Rus- sian literature and culture. Karlinsky’s writings on the subject appeared primarily in the leading gay outlets, but his concerns were echoed across the board. He was particularly active in exploring the hidden and not-so- hidden lives of some Russian cultural figures who happened to be homo- sexual. 5 He played a leading role in promoting or defending the reputa- 5 For one example among several, see Simon Karlinsky, “Russia’s Gay Literature and Culture: The Impact of the October Revolution,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past , ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 347–64, 552–59. 10 Preface tions of outstanding gay figures such as the émigré poet Valery Pereleshin and the persecuted Soviet poet Gennady Trifonov, along with Mikhail Kuzmin, Sergei Diaghilev, and Pyotr Chaikovsky. At the same time, he worked to combat what he described in Christopher Street as the “self- imposed brainwashing ... in the [American] gay movement” in the 1970s. Subjects that he addressed included the virulently homophobic nature in the practice of Marxist-Leninist ideology, to which a number of Western gay liberationists then subscribed and which, Karlinsky pointed out, had given rise to genocidal terror in the Soviet Union and China. The author himself considered his Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (1985), a book that grew out of an admired course in the history of the Russian theater, his greatest achievement. It is the result of monumental research and thinking about the origins and early development of the Russian stage. His colleagues lamented the fact that he never produced a follow-up, for he was a rare connoisseur as well of the plays of Gogol, Ostrovsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov, and the Russian Symbolist and Postsymbolist theater. A steady stream of articles and reviews in such mainstream media as the New York Times Book Review, the TLS , and the Nation , and in the pro- fessional journals, addressed a wide gamut of subjects and personalities. Karlinsky’s interests ranged from saints’ lives and the Domostroi to Soviet institutions; from eighteenth-century Russian comic opera to Chaikovsky, Ravel, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich; from the prose of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, and his revered Chekhov to the novels of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. He devoted special attention to Modernist poetry and drama (Gippius, Annensky, Kuzmin, Acmeists, Futurists and Soviet-era poets) and was the enthusiastic champion of such younger émigré poets as Pereleshin and Nikolai Morshen. 6 Karlinsky had a nuanced command of both Russian and English. He was a master of simultaneous translation, a superb interpreter—and per- former—of literary texts. Numerous translations of works by and about 6 For lists of his publications, see the bibliography compiled by Molly Molloy, pp. 4–31 of the Festschrift in his honor, For SK: In Celebration of the Life and Career of Simon Karlinsky , ed. Michael S. Flier and Robert P. Hughes (Oakland: Berkeley Slavic Spe- cialties, 1994); and the more selective list accompanying Christopher Putney’s entry “Simon Karlinsky” in Gay and Lesbian Literature , vol. 2, ed. Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998), 201–4. 11 Preface Russian writers bear his imprint, both acknowledged and silent; his read- ings of many major texts will endure. The heyday of Karlinsky’s scholarly career coincided with the Cold War and an extended period of stagnation in social, political and cultural life in the Soviet Union, and much of his most valuable work is best un- derstood against that background. His disgust with the restrictive and re- stricted worldviews, rampant censorship, and hidebound ideologies that were so characteristic of the period (1950s–1980s) is everywhere evident in his published writings. 7 Karlinsky was in his eighty-fifth year when he died at his home in Kensington, California, on 5 July 2009. He was surrounded in his later years by friends and colleagues, two devoted care-givers, and his beloved companion of thirty-five years, Peter Carleton (whom he was able to marry only in 2008). We offer the present volume as a tribute to the dis- tinguished career of Simon Karlinsky as a teacher and publishing scholar. The idea for this collection originated in our conversations at and after a conference held in Simon’s memory at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley in October 2010 (“‘Freedom from Violence and Lies’: A Conference in Celebration of the Life and Work of Simon Karlinsky”). 8 Several of his colleagues translated articles for the present book, and we are grateful to them for this contribution: Joan Grossman, Olga Raevsky- Hughes, Joachim Klein, Liza Knapp, Hugh McLean, Eric Naiman, and Kevin O’Brien. We also extend our appreciation to the helpful staff of the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley for providing us access to the Simon Karlinsky Papers prior to the complete processing of this collection (BANC MSS 2010/177), to Peter Carleton, to David Frick and Irina Paperno of Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, to Sharona Vedol, our editor at Academic Studies Press, 7 The reader will occasionally come across a “current,” “new,” or “recent” reference that pertains to a time when the essay first appeared. We have not endeavored to revise all such language, and as noted, this context is well worth understanding and appre- ciating. 8 The title is from Anton Chekhov’s letter to Aleksei Pleshcheev, 4 October 1888: “My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.” Letters of Anton Chekhov , translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky; selection, commentary, and introduction by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 109. 12 Preface and to the publishers identified herein who granted permission for republication. The editors have supplied contextualizing postscripts and footnotes (identified as such), and have silently added references and made small corrections as needed. A reader moving continuously through the essays will find some repetition on related topics, but we decided there was value to preserving the integrity of each individual piece and limited our edito- rial intrusion. We gave much thought to how we should normalize the transliteration of Russian in SK’s texts (republished from a wide range of periodicals and miscellanies) and in our footnotes and postscripts. In the end, for Russian names we largely adopted the approach in the Handbook of Russian Literature , edited by Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), which is close to the systems used in periodicals like the New York Times Book Review and the TLS . The adjectival endings – ый and – ий (which appear in many Russian names) are rendered by – y in the English text. The soft and hard signs are usually ignored. However, in the patro- nymic suffixes – ьевич and – ьевна the initial soft sign is rendered by i . The front vowels ё , я and ю are rendered by yo , ya, and yu , and a stand-alone ы is rendered by y . The Cyrillic front vowel e , however, is rendered by e , and so the sequence of two front vowels ee in Russian remains ee in translitera- tion. Thus the initial e of a transliterated word is usually pronounced “ye,” and we adjure our non-Russian readers to pronounce the double vowel ee as two separate syllables, each involving a diphthong (“ye”–“ye”), and not as the ee in tweet . For some Russian names where a standard vari- ant has been in wide use for a very long time (e.g., Chaliapin, Diaghilev, Rachmaninoff)—but with Chaikovsky as a notable exception—we have retained that variant. Words and quotations transliterated from Russian as well as Russian citations in the footnotes employ the system used by the Library of Congress (LC), but with diacriticals omitted. RPH TAK RT September 2012 I Pushkin and Romanticism 14 Two Pushkin Studies I. Pushkin, Chateaubriand, and the Romantic Pose 1 The Romantic Pose—I “I dare say it was the French who made boredom fashionable,” says the naive Maksim Maksimovich in Hero of Our Time . The nar- rator disabuses him of this notion by informing him that the fashion of being bored had been invented by the English. For Lermontov and his readers in 1840, there was no doubt whatsoever that the Romantic pose of boredom and disillusionment had been invented and popularized singlehandedly by Lord Byron. Byron’s phenomenal stranglehold on the literary world of the 1820s and 1830s had done much to obscure in the minds of both the writers and the public the great debt that the English poet owed his immediate predecessor, François-Auguste Chateaubriand. Lev Tolstoi, who had a better historical perspective than most, gives us an example of the Chateaubrianesque Romantic pose in the episode of the courtship of Julie Karagina by Boris Drubetskoi, in War and Peace 2 Julie’s pretense of having suffered a mysterious misfortune, of having become disillusioned with people and about her own future, is, despite certain lingering overtones of Karamzinist sentimentality, a rare case of quasi- Byronic affectation in a female character. (It was with the advent of Byron that Byronism became an exclusively male prerogative.) This Byronism avant la lettre is historically correct around 1812 if attributed to the vogue of Chateaubriand. Pitilessly, Tolstoi shows the attitude for what it is: a set of emotional mannerisms based on literary sources. Pushkin the prose writer, describing the arrival of Aleksei Berestov in the remote province in which the action of “Mistress as Maid” is set, would obviously have agreed with this view of the Romantic pose, and so would Maksim Maksimovich, although Lermontov himself would probably have had a reservation or 1 Originally published in California Slavic Studies 2 (1963): 96–107. 2 Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace , vol. 2, pt. 5, chap. 5. 15 Two Pushkin Studies two. As for Chateaubriand, who thought that he was describing a real phe- nomenon when he wrote René , he lived long enough to denounce most of the descendants of his famous hero as poseurs, and to express regret that he had ever started the trend. 3 Chateaubriand and Byron There can be no doubt of the prestige and popularity of Chateaubriand in Russia throughout Pushkin’s adult life. Scenes from Atala decorate porce- lain cups and vases manufactured in Russia in the 1820s. 4 The impact of René on Batyushkov is well documented. Chateaubriand and Ballanche were the major French sources of inspiration for Pushkin’s close friend, the political philosopher Chaadaev. As early as 1810, Prince P. B. Koz- lovsky (who much later was a friend of Pushkin’s) wrote to Chateaubriand to inform him that Atala and René had been translated in Russia and had been “received with unparalleled avidity.” He continued, “I have made de- liberate inquiries, and was informed that even in Tobolsk the subscription for both works was great, and thus now the poor Siberian, wrapped in his furs, can dream of the beautiful sites where the Meschacebé flows!” 5 And a glance at the letter that Vyazemsky wrote to Chateaubriand in 1839, when, after Pushkin’s death, he sent the aged writer a French translation of Pushkin’s article “Milton and Chateaubriand’s Translation of Paradise Lost ,” 6 furnishes conclusive proof that Chateaubriand was a major and awesome literary figure to the majority of literate Russians throughout the period of Pushkin’s career. In retrospect, it seems clear that the work of Chateaubriand which had impressed his contemporaries most profoundly, Le génie du chris- tianisme , was a labor of synthesis rather than of imagination. (Indeed, his only original contribution was the restoration of religion as a respectable intellectual pursuit.) With amazing thoroughness, he combined and fused the disparate elements which had appeared as early as the last half of the 3 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Monaco, 1958), 1:462. 4 Reproductions are shown in Literaturnoe nasledstvo , vols. 33/34 (Moscow, 1939), 653, 657, and 665. 5 Gleb Struve, Russkii evropeets (San Francisco: Delo, 1950), 81. 6 Reproduced, together with Chateaubriand’s indifferent reply, in Literaturnoe nasled- stvo , vols. 31/32 (Moscow, 1937), 146. 16 I. Pushkin and Romanticism seventeenth century, and which we can now consider to have been signs of the evolving Romantic sensibility. In the three key texts of Le génie du christianisme —the diagnostic chapter entitled “Du vague des passions” (part 2, book 2, chapter 9) and the two famed set pieces, René and Atala (the latter first published separately in 1801), Chateaubriand incorporated such basically antirationalist eighteenth-century trends as the love of tears in the writings of Richardson, Sterne, and Diderot; the taste for ruins and other morbid settings in Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe; the back-to-nature philosophy of Rousseau and of his German and English followers; and of course the various forms of exoticism: historical, as in Ossian; American, as in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; and Oriental, as in Beckford. We can com- plete the Chateaubrianesque recipe by adding Molière’s Alceste, solitary and misunderstood, calling on Célimène to follow him into the desert; the vague yearnings and discontent of Goethe’s Werther (there is little chance that Chateaubriand knew the German pre-Romantics at the time when he was writing Le génie ); nor should we forget such seventeenth-century French poets of the “Baroque” school as Saint-Amant and Théophile de Viau, whose favorite themes were meditations on the transience of hu- man glory, a predilection for solitary and melancholy landscapes, and a longing for a happy, sunny, orange-and-lemon-filled Italy. Chateaubriand transmits to the nineteenth century all the diverse attitudes and preoc- cupations which were considered peculiar and bizarre by the seventeenth century, but were gradually made respectable through the efforts of the eighteenth-century writers. Even with this repertoire, there were still a few themes and décors of the later Byronic Romantics that were missing in Le génie , and some of these were utilized by Chateaubriand when he published his account of his travels through the Moslem Near East, the Greek Isles, and Spain, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem , in 1811, one year before the appearance of the first cantos of Childe Harold With the advent of Byron’s popularity, Chateaubriand was not exactly forgotten, but his contribution to the formulation and synthesis of many of the Byronic themes was often overlooked, much to his later resentment. From about 1820 on, even such an obvious child of Chateaubriand as La- martine had to consider himself Byronic. According to the description given by Edmond Estève in his huge and useful book, 7 there was some- 7 Edmond Estève, Byron et le romantisme français (Paris, 1907). 17 Two Pushkin Studies thing hypnotic about the hold that Byron acquired over the French liter- ary world after the publication of Amédée Pichot’s prose renderings of the poet’s major works into French in 1819–21. And it is after the appearance of Pichot’s version, significantly enough, that Byron became the major center of attention in the Slavic countries as well. The influence of Byron’s verse tales on Pushkin is clear, even if Push- kin read them, as he probably did, with the aid of Pichot’s Chateaubrian- esque-Ossianic prose paraphrases. Volumes have been written about this influence, and during the lifetime of the greatest Russian poet it was com- mon practice to refer to him (rather unjustly, we might add) as a disciple of Byron. The problem of Chateaubriand’s direct influence on Pushkin, besides being complicated by the mere fact of Byron’s, has always present- ed a peculiarly Russian difficulty to any Pushkin scholar who may have wished to examine it. There is a long Russian tradition, going back to the 1840s and still very much in vogue, of dealing with every literary influ- ence primarily in the light of its social and political implications. Now the legend of Lord Bryon, the ardent enemy of kings, the critic of established churches, the martyr who lost his life in the fight for Greek freedom, makes him an eminently suitable literary ancestor for the great Russian poet from the point of view of the nineteenth-century Russian progressive tradition. 8 Chateaubriand, the Catholic apologist of Le génie du christian- isme , the royalist who turned his back on the earlier philosophic positions expressed in his Essai ... sur les révolutions ... , and who, in his capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Restoration, was instrumental in sending French troops to put down the Spanish rebellion— this Cha- teaubriand is quite unacceptable to the greater part of nineteenth-century Russian opinion, and certainly to present Soviet views, as an influence on Pushkin, and the numerous professions of admiration for Chateaubriand by the poet himself seem to make no difference in the face of the official Pushkin hagiography. 8 A typical expression of this viewpoint can be found in Aleksei Veselovskii, Bairon (Moscow: Tipo-lit. A. V. Vasil’eva, 1902). Obviously confusing the later political repu- tations of the two writers with the content of their writings, Veselovsky ( Bairon , 62) dismisses Chateaubriand’s influence on Byron on the grounds that “the selfishness of Chateaubriand’s René is irreconcilable with love of the people.... Rousseau alone had bequeathed to Harold the protest against the false civilization, the delicacy of feeling and understanding of nature.” 18 I. Pushkin and Romanticism Nevertheless, the question of the relationship between Pushkin and Chateaubriand was raised at the beginning of the twentieth century by V. V. Sipovsky in his study Pushkin, Byron and Chateaubriand 9 Professor Sipovsky’s thesis is that most of Pushkin’s so-called Byronism is attrib- utable to the influence of Chateaubriand’s René , Atala , and Les Natchez ; this conclusion is based on the comparison of those works with Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Gypsies . The study contains some excellent insights, but is badly marred by some curious juggling of quota- tions, which confuses rather than supports the basic thesis. In 1911, A. L. Bem sharply attacked Sipovsky’s contentions, charging him with “stack- ing” quotations and ignoring the social, political, and biographical data involved. 10 V. M. Zhirmunsky’s book Pushkin and Byron , published in 1924, relies heavily on Bem for its refutation of the Chateaubriand theory of the origin of The Prisoner of the Caucasus . Zhirmunsky maintains that The Corsair , being a work written in verse, is a more likely ancestor for Pushkin’s poem, quite forgetting that in Pichot’s prose The Corsair often looks amazingly similar to Atala . Both Sipovsky and his two adversaries disregard the relationship between Chateaubriand and Byron, which after all existed quite independently of Pushkin; 11 moreover, they seem to be wholly unaware of the chronology of this relationship. Bem’s triumphant conclusion, approvingly quoted by Zhirmunsky, that “had there not been a Byron, Pushkin’s literary production would have been different, but had there been no Chateaubriand, Pushkin’s production would have been the same,” 12 can be easily countered by a third possibility, namely, that had there been no Chateaubriand, Byron’s production would have been different. One is tempted to suspect that both Bem and Zhirmunsky tend to minimize the role of Chateaubriand because of their own commitment to Germanic studies. More recently, one of the most notable Soviet Pushkin 9 Published as a separate study in 1899, it later became a chapter (under the same title) in V. V. Sipovskii, Pushkin (St. Petersburg, 1907). 10 A. L. Bem, “K voprosu o vliianii Shatobriana na Pushkina,” Pushkin i ego sovremen- niki , vol. 15 (1911), 146–63. 11 While pointedly insulting Chateaubriand the politician in stanza 16 of The Age of Bronze , Byron makes clear his respect for Chateaubriand the writer in a footnote to this stanza. Teresa Guicciolli’s interesting testimony on Byron’s opinion of Chateau- briand is quoted by Estève, Byron , 22. 12 V. M. Zhirmunskii, Bairon i Pushkin (Leningrad, 1924), 43. 19 Two Pushkin Studies scholars, B. V. Tomashevsky, has cautiously tried to revive Sipovsky’s theory of the origin of The Prisoner of the Caucasus 13 Tomashevsky’s account of the Pushkin-Chateaubriand relationship is informative, but it is unfortunately given in the form of an arbitrary reconstruction of Pushkin’s changing attitudes toward Chateaubriand, based not on the poet’s own testimony (which is available in abundance), but rather on Soviet notions of how a liberal and patriotic Pushkin ought to have felt about various vicissitudes of Chateaubriand’s political career under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. This involves Tomashevsky in some strange distortions of causes and results of the Revolution of 1830, in line with the common Russian practice of suppressing historical fact to score a political point. Pushkin’s Opinion of Chateaubriand: Pushkin’s Prose Pushkin’s attitude toward Chateaubriand can be seen most clearly in the poet’s critical articles. Chateaubriand is mentioned in seven of Pushkin’s articles and essays: (1) “André Chénier” (an unfinished draft, dated 1825); (2) “Essay of Reply to Certain Nonliterary Accusations,” and its earlier version, “Refutation of Critics” (1830), both of which contain quotations from Chateaubriand; (3) “Review of Reviews” (1831), in which Cha- teaubriand is listed among the French and English journalists to whom contemporary Russian journalists are unfavorably contrasted; (4) Push- kin’s review of A. N. Muravyov’s Journey to the Holy Land (1832); (5) the article “M. E. Lobanov’s Opinions about the Spirit of Literature, Both Foreign and Domestic,” which Pushkin published in his magazine The Contemporary in 1836; (6) “John Tanner” ( The Contemporary , 1836); and finally, (7) “Milton and Chateaubriand’s Translation of Paradise Lost ” ( The Contemporary , 1837). The article on Milton and Chateaubriand, the last of Pushkin’s articles published within the poet’s lifetime, contained an extended critical appreciation of Chateaubriand as a writer, as well as a defense of Essai sur la littérature anglaise , one of the two Chateaubriand texts in which the French writer complains of Byron’s ingratitude in not recognizing his literary parentage. 13 B. V. Tomashevskii, Pushkin i Frantsiia (Leningrad, 1960). Pushkin’s attitude toward Chateaubriand is discussed on pp. 159–61. Sipovsky’s role is mentioned in a note on p. 452.