GenericCoverform_PC.pdf by Catriona Kelly

Author:Catriona Kelly [Kelly, Catriona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0192801449
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-10-04T18:07:12+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.

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

of

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