Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction by Catriona Kelly

Author:Catriona Kelly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘A

wakenin

g nobl

e feelin

gs with

14. Cartoon of two writers by Yu. Gorokhov.

my lyre’

that Tolstoy’s successors will provide them with ethical stimulation of

just this kind. It was no accident that the first literary award to be

supported by Western investors in Russia should have been the Booker

Prize for the Russian novel, inspired by the quixotic notion of reviving

the genre in the country that many still considered its natural

homeland.

97

Chapter 6

‘And don’t dispute

with fools’

Men, women, and society

For you, my enchantresses,

Only for you, my beauties . . .

(Pushkin, dedication to Ruslan and Ludmilla, 1820)

It would be hard to choose a better example of the difficulties raised by

translating Pushkin than the final phrase of ‘Monument’. In English, it

sounds perfectly banal, like a phrase from a guide to ‘making friends

and influencing people’. Once again, register plays a part: the Russian

word glupets has a folksy resonance that would make ‘And do not

squabble with the daft’ in some ways a more adequate rendering. Even

so, modern readers are likely to wonder at the combination of

apparently incompatible themes in these last two lines. What

connection could there be between a dignified command to a poet’s

muse to ‘be obedient to the command of God’ and an apparently trivial

piece of savoir vivre? (To be sure, the phrase bears some relation to a

supposed quotation from the Koran jotted down in a draft of Evgeny

Onegin, ‘Don’t quarrel with a fool’, but since the person citing the

quotation was Evgeny himself, and it was preceded with a bare-faced

piece of flippancy, ‘There’s plenty of common sense in the Koran’, the

sacred text was reduced here to nothing more than a conduct book.)

Yet the rough draft of ‘Monument’ indicates that ‘And don’t dispute

with fools’ was firmly in Pushkin’s head from the start of composition. It

98

is the only line in the final three stanzas that was set down straight away

in the form that it has in the final text. And the view of the poet as

associated not only with the transcendent world of religious and

mystical appearance, but also with the banalities of high society, comes

up again and again in Pushkin’s later poetry. ‘The Poet’ (1827), for

example, is structured round an opposition between ‘the concerns of

the empty-headed monde’ (that is, of high society) and ‘the divine

word’ (that is, of poetic inspiration), an opposition spanned by the

poet himself, who lives alternately in each domain. Appealing to the

Romantic myth of artists as socially isolated, Pushkin also invokes

another and contradictory myth of the artist as honnête homme,

well-spoken man of the world. This myth had been introduced to

Russian culture in the late eighteenth century by Nikolay Karamzin,

who had asserted, in a famous article, ‘Why Russia Has So Few

‘An

Literary Talents’ (1802), that without proper access to polite society

d don’t

it was hard for a writer to educate his taste, however learned he

might be.

disp

ute

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia, the reading

with

of literature was an obligatory polite accomplishment for both men

fools’

and women; indeed, writing itself was perceived as an agreeable social

skill. Large numbers of women in the aristocracy and gentry kept an

al’bom, a mixture of a scrap-book and a commonplace book,

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