The Feud by Alex Beam

Author:Alex Beam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

and ending with the famous image at 1:33—

I recollect the sea before a tempest:

how I envied the waves

running in turbulent succession

with love to lie down at her feet.

How much I longed then with the waves

to touch the dear feet with my lips!

What takes Pushkin 140 iambs to express takes Nabokov fifteen pages of dense analysis. The “Pedal Digression,” Nabokov writes, “is one of the wonders of the work.” “Neither Ovid, nor Brantôme, nor Casanova has put much grace or originality into his favorable comment on women’s feet.”

Nabokov quickly dismissed the banal suggestion that Pushkin may have been a foot fetishist (or ankle? or calf?):*7 “The passion for a pretty instep that Pushkin shared with Goethe would have been called ‘foot-fetishism’ by a modern student of the psychology of sex,” a remark he doesn’t bother to dignify with further explanation.*8 To hell with “the Viennese quack” and his epigones, and while we are at it, to hell with those idiot translators he’s been telling us about. This stretch of the “Commentary” is particularly brutal on “bluff Spalding,” “Solecistic Prof. Elton,” and “Helpless Miss Radin” and includes what we would call today an unprovoked drive-by on Henri Troyat’s 1946 Pushkin biography (“tritely written and teeming with errors”), which I recall reading with immense pleasure on a beach, as it happens (albeit a very cold beach), outside Riga, with waves licking at my feet. But I digress.*9

The heart of Nabokov’s divagation, however, is a whodunit: Whose footprints are these, he asks, flitting so gracefully across Onegin’s pages? “The search for a historically real lady, whose foot the glass shoe*10 of this stanza [33] would fit, has taxed the ingeniousness or revealed the simplicity of numerous Pushkinists,” he writes.

It is an interesting question because Pushkin had many, many lady friends, at least two of whom left memoirs of gamboling with the mutton-chopped young poet-exile at the seashore. The prime suspect is the beautiful Maria Rayevskaya, one of four children of Gen. Nikolai Rayevsky, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Pushkin knew the family intimately, and of course admired the general’s attractive young daughters. Maria left a memoir (“remarkably banal and naïve”—Nabokov) in which she recalled playing in the waves with Pushkin at Taganrog, on the shore of the Azov Sea. The poet had hitched a ride south with the Rayevskys on his way to the Caucasus.

Maria recalled that Pushkin wrote “some charming verses” about the seaside idyll. Nabokov distrusts her memory because she gets her own age wrong. He proceeds to investigate Maria’s older sister Ekaterina (“splendid-looking, goddess-like and proud”) as the Lady of the Sea. In 1820 Pushkin spent three weeks in the Crimean village of Gurzuf, where Ekaterina and her mother were living in a rented seaside palazzo. Nabokov thinks Pushkin alluded to his infatuation with Ekaterina in some lines from “Onegin’s Journey,” the abandoned chapter 7 of an early draft. “The glass shoe does not fit [Maria Rayevski’s] foot,” Nabokov concluded after several pages of textual scholarship. “It may fit Ekaterina’s, but that is a mere guess based on our knowledge of Pushkin’s infatuation with her.

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