Nobody But Nobody Can Translate Pushkin!

My experience with Pushkin is limited to two of his works, The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovitch Belkin (1831), in prose, and his famous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1833). My old friend Pat Kent, who was a Russian scholar, used to quote a Russian friend of his saying, and you must imagine a thick accent, “Nobody but nobody can translate Pushkin!” This was in reference to the verse novel, and indeed one of the most famous literary friendships came to an end over the translation of the book. Vladimir Nabokov thought he could translate Pushkin and Edmund Wilson thought he could critique the translation, and the result was years of squabble and alienation.

            I think Pushkin’s prose must be easier to turn into English. Gillon Aitken translated my copy of The Tales of Belkin. Pushkin considered these five stories experimental, and for some reason did not wish to publish them under his own name. Hence the pretense that he is really the editor (he signs the “editorial” preface with his own initials) who has undertaken to publish these manuscripts of stories connected with each other only by the claim that they have all been told to Belkin, who has recorded them. The “editor” prefixes a pompous letter from a neighbor about Belkin; it tells us nothing. So the stories are kept at several pseudoeditorial removes. Supposedly Belkin hears them from people indirectly involved, as in the case of “The Shot,” though the apparatus is dropped in the third tale, where the narrator speaks to us directly as “deviating…from the normal practice of modern novelists” in his descriptions. The framing maneuvers Pushkin may have adopted because he liked them in Sir Walter Scott—whom he mentions in the third tale.

            The first two tales are bizarrely unlikely. In the first, “The Shot,” the narrator sees his officer friend, Silvio, whom he knows to be a deadly shot, ignore an insult and eschew a duel, and he asks for an explanation. Silvio says he is waiting to fulfill a threat. He refrained from firing at a Count who had insulted him when the Count did not care enough about the outcome of the duel, and Silvio is saving that unfired shot until it really matters to his dueling opponent, and refraining from endangering his own life in the meantime. The narrator loses touch with Silvio, but later learns directly from the Count that Silvio found him shortly after the Count’s marriage and told him he would now take the shot, but allows the Count one first. The Count’s shot misses, and Silvio fires his shot to hit near the bullet hole created by the missed shot, and leaves.

            In “The Blizzard,” the real bridegroom is hopelessly waylaid from his marriage. Somehow another man wanders in and is pressed into the wedding service; the bride is swooning and does not realize it is the wrong bridegroom. Years later, the original bridegroom dead after never having been able to find his bride, the couple who wed by chance that night meet and fall in love.

            “The Coffin-Maker” is more conventional, and a little like Chekhov. The coffin-maker imagines himself insulted by local artisans who invite him to a feast because, when they toast their customers, they look at him and jokingly drink to his as well. He angrily and drunkenly says he’ll only invite his own clientele to his party. They show up the next night, like a comic zombie movie, and give him a fright until he wakes up.

            The fourth tale is sometimes titled “The Postmaster” in translations, but what is meant is a man who keeps, not a post office, but a posting house where horses are available to be rented out. “Station Master” is only a little better.

            In this tale a traveler who sometimes got horses at a rural posting house tells the story of Dunya, who runs away with a Hussar from this very posting house, her father’s, which is filled with pictures of the Prodigal Son story. In a twist on that biblical parable, Dunya eventually returns, not as the poor woman of the streets her father feared she would become, but a rich woman traveling in style with her children. But Dunya is too late to do more than shed some tears on the grave of her father.

            In the fifth tale there is no longer any pretense of people telling Belkin their stories; the narrator speaks directly to the reader often: “If I followed my own wishes, I would here begin…a description….The reader will relieve me of the unnecessary task of describing the dénouement.” The most contrived of the tales in terms of plot, this is also the most charmingly satisfying. It is Romeo and Juliet meets She Stoops to Conquer, with the latter’s comic ending.

            Lisa, the daughter of one of two feuding landowners, wishes to meet Alexei, the son of the other. So as not to appear forward, she disguises herself as a peasant. They fall in love, but he at first sees the match as barred by their differing status. Then the feuding fathers meet by chance, one is thrown from his horse and the other gives assistance, an invitation is accepted. But the reconciliation leads to an agreement between them that their children shall marry, and Alexei will not agree, since he thinks he loves someone else. But all ends happily when he proposes to the peasant girl in a letter and then finds the lady at home reading it when he calls at her father’s house.

            Pushkin is a clear prose stylist with a light and often comic touch. But the work for which he will always be known is in verse. Eugene Onegin is a verse novel in eight chapters or cantos, which were separately published over the years 1823 to 1831, and the first book publication was in 1833. Each canto has approximately fifty stanzas. Pushkin backed away from his initial description of his book as “in the manner of Byron’s Don Juan,” but the stanza form with its frequent feminine rhyme is unmistakable, and so is the comic effect of telling a story this way. The frequent authorial commentary on the action is also comic, but these comic effects overlay a tragic plot.

           Onegin retires to the country in his twenties, worn out with his rakish life in St. Petersburg. He visits the household where his friend Lensky has been accepted by the younger daughter Olga. The older daughter, the innocent, retiring and bookish Tatyana, falls in love with him and writes a letter expressing her love. He lectures her about his time of love being over, her prospects for another, happier love, and so on. Forced by Lensky to go to the house again, he is overly attentive to Olga to make Lensky jealous. It works, Lensky challenges him to a duel and is killed. Years later Onegin meets Tatyana in town, a princess now and superbly poised. He falls in love, writes a letter expressing it, and gets a lecture in his turn.

            But there is more. Pushkin is himself a character in the story, a friend of Onegin, a poet who observes all of this from a distance, commenting on it, on his own Muse, on the change of seasons, on the health of the country versus the dissipation of the city, on the code of honor that traps people like Lensky and Onegin, and on much more.

            The book was Pushkin’s own favorite and is generally considered his best work. Its iambic tetrameter lines are arranged in a distinctive sonnet-length stanza with not only an intricate rhyme scheme but a correspondingly complicated pattern of male and female rhymes. It is the female rhymes which give to the verse its comic and even cynical tone which plays against the romantic feelings aroused in the course of the story and its tragic outcome.

            Despite the fact he did not invent the verse form, Pushkin created something in Eugene Onegin that is original and unique in Russian literature. When you come across a Russian novel that is short, comic, and in verse, you have to cherish it.