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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A dazzling new collection of Pushkin's most essential fiction, in definitive translations by the acclaimed Anthony Briggs Pushkin's restless creative genius laid the foundations for Russian prose. His stories, among the greatest and most influential ever written, retain stunning directness and precision, more than ever in Anthony Brigg's finely nuanced translations. Upending expectations at every turn, Pushkin depicts brutal conflicts and sudden reversals of fortune with disarming lightness and sly humour. These are stories of fateful chances: a stationmaster encourages his young daughter to ride to town with a traveller, only to lose her forever; a man obsessively pursues an elderly woman's secret for success at cards with bizarre results, in 'The Queen of Spades'; and in The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin's great historical novella of love and rebellion in the era of Catherine the Great, a mysterious encounter proves fatally significant during a violent uprising.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
Essential Stories
Translated from the Russian by Anthony Briggs
PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON
Contents
Introduction
Pushkin created the Russian literary language, was the founder of modern Russian literature and made humanity the richer for his immortal works.
professor i. luppol (1939)
The only modern artist whom Pushkin resembles is Mozart; with Mozart and perhaps Goethe he can claim to be the greatest and most universal genius since the Renaissance.
sir isaiah berlin (1980)
Alexander pushkin (1799–1837) is the father of modern Russian culture, the man who reformed the Russian literary language, and, in a short lifetime of less than thirty-seven years, left a legacy of outstanding works in several genres, some of them newly invented. The creative potential of this generous provision was soon to be exploited, gratefully and repeatedly, by a galaxy of talented writers, musicians and artists who have brought lasting glory to their country. Every one of them has acknowledged Pushkin as their indispensable master and model.8
This is due mainly to his poetry. Pushkin wrote well over eight hundred poems, including a dozen narratives and a number of versified dramas. In his poetry—a playground of acoustic delight—we can revel in the joyful springtime of literary Russian, newly incubated by a genius of language, not through academic endeavour or deliberate intention but by an instinctive blending of three linguistic currents hitherto kept apart. These were: Old Church Slavonic, familiar to all Russians from their liturgy (similar in effect to the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer as experienced until recently by all English-speakers), and modern Russian in two widely separated strands—effete salon speech overdependent on French, and its opposite, vernacular Russian with all the vigour and vulgarity of country folk and their naughty children. The language that emerged happened to be richly endowed with strong word stress, ten vowels and twenty consonants, none of them nasal, along with a couple of mute but sound-modifying signs, all of which have created one of Europe’s most expressive tongues. Russian covers all auditory possibilities from guttural or glottal harshness to mellifluous Italianate melody, and Pushkin’s instinctive manipulation of these rich resources has never been improved upon.
But this is poetry. What about Pushkin’s prose? First, there is more of it than most people realize. In quantitive terms, over his two brief decades of literary activity Pushkin wrote what amounted to two million printed signs, of which one million are in verse, and the other million in prose. He 9turned to prose partly because he had satisfied all the main challenges offered by poetry in the early nineteenth century, or was in the process of doing so. His greatest achievement in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was completed in 1831, and his finest narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman, came out in 1833, but only after being returned to him by Tsar Nicholas, covered in annotations and question marks. By that time the (prose) writing was on the wall. The penultimate chapter of Onegin was coolly received, as were the play Boris Godunov and the long historical poem Poltava, and the idea that he was now concentrating on prose began to circulate. Even the popularity of Lord Byron (a decade dead) was past its peak. Pushkin’s gradual withdrawal from poetry certainly owed something to a change in public taste, to which it would have been foolish not to respond.
This cautious yet radical development did not involve a drastic change of style or attitude. Most of his intentions and skills proved to be transferable. Precision, neatness, brevity, natural language undistorted by extravagant tropology, acoustic sensibility, breadth of generic interest and a pioneering spirit linked to an instinct for the demotic, in subject matter and form—all of these endowments would continue to stand him in good stead. He had to find his own way. Although many distinguished works of Russian prose lay just around the corner, there was not much inspiration or competition to be had from storytellers of the twenties and thirties of that century in that country. Who has even heard of writers 10like Narezhny, Bulgarin, Zagoskin or Bestuzhev-Marlinsky? There are two striking facts about Pushkin’s multifarious efforts in prose. First, they are original, owing little to literary predecessors (except for a little target practice invited by Sentimental or Romantic excesses); the two writers (other than Byron) whose manner and style caught Pushkin’s imagination were both foreigners: the French satirist Voltaire and Laurence Sterne, read in a French translation. By contrast, however, Pushkin was himself destined to exert a procreative effect on a multitude of subsequent writers. Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and all the rest—this is where you all began, at the feet of Alexander Pushkin.
His first attempt at prose fiction, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, a historical novel based on the life of his own ancestor, Ibrahim Hannibal, began well but was broken off at the seventh chapter and never resumed—a great loss to Russian letters. The main character is not the blackamoor but Tsar Peter, a constant preoccupation of the author, which culminated in The Bronze Horseman. The failed attempt to combine family interest with Russian history was followed by a rather experimental group of original stories, The Tales of Belkin, which are perhaps best seen as parodies, though one of them, “The Stationmaster”, is much loved and admired as Russian literature’s first example of a small-scale tragedy based on the failure of a little man, warmly presented in sympathetic and humane terms. An extensive list of other unfinished 11works, sadly illustrating Pushkin’s uncertain grip on the new genre, which took years to settle into confidence and mature achievement, includes “A History of Goryukhin Village” (1830), Roslavlev (1831), Dubrovsky (1832–33) and “Kirdzhali” (1834). A brilliant exception to the uncertainty and insecurity of this new enterprise was Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1833). This startlingly successful work is a gripping narrative about greed and obsessive gambling in a context redolent of the supernatural. The hero, Hermann, descends from prudence and self-control, through irresistible compulsion, to discover a winning formula, the search for which turns him into a de facto murderer and an incurable madman. The summit of Pushkin’s achievement in prose, a tale of sustained interest and psychological finesse, widely accepted as the greatest short story in Russian, this piece is also the subject of Tchaikovsky’s most profound and moving opera, which bears the same name.
The Captain’s Daughter is not easy to place in this canon: it is too easily misread and undervalued. A short novel of about 40,000 words, it recounts the (mis)adventures of a young Russian officer cadet, Pyotr Grinyov, launched too early into a complex and difficult arena, army life in the south of the Russian empire. Down in those barely civilized regions a real-life revolutionary Cossack peasant, Yemelyan Pugachov, had launched himself as the fugitive Tsar Peter III, and was scoring one military success after another in a bold attempt to build up a force strong enough even to 12depose the sovereign and take control of the country. In our story we catch him on the rise, observe his conquests and atrocities with shock and horror, but eventually live through to happier times and the restoration of good order. In this theatre Grinyov plays out his own personal destiny, which includes several meetings with the Impostor and also the development of a love story which works out in his favour, though not without serious setbacks and dire threats to life, limb and lasting happiness. The two stories, personal and historical, are carefully woven together and full of narrative excitement. Pushkin knew his subject well, having conducted detailed research and fieldwork which culminated in a solid work, A History of the Pugachov Rebellion (1833–34), but he was remarkably un-Tolstoyan in the restrained exploitation of this knowledge. This is not to disparage Tolstoy and his epic masterpiece but rather to show Pushkin’s sensitivity to the demands of an earlier period and a different genre, the literary-historical romance. In this field his laconic manner does imply criticism of Sir Walter Scott, who always writes at five times the length of his Russian admirer. A reader of The Captain’s Daughter is bound to be impressed by the author’s lightness of touch, which ensures that we are never wearied, overwhelmed or unnecessarily distracted.
Such an achievement is rare, but easily explained. Pushkin has brought to bear on a demanding prose genre his own interests, qualities, methods and attitudes, demonstrated and developed in poetry over the previous decade and a half. 13These are based on a high regard for the written word and a sympathy for humanity at large and in particular. This combined sentiment has to be carefully apportioned and lightly administered, with an attitude so close to levity that no whiff of over-seriousness—nothing portentous, pretentious, wearisome, academic, condescending, exigent or sanctimonious—is allowed to get in the way of a reader’s interest and potential support. Reading must be fun, whatever the subject matter, and nothing must impede the flow of entertainment.
This way of describing Pushkin’s quality is itself un-Pushkinian. We must be more specific. What distinguishes this writer is his capacity for the compression and miniaturization of human experience. He has a way of depositing small details and skipping away, knowing that they will be built upon rather than forgotten. The point is eloquently put by Henri Troyat, who argues that in some respects Pushkin, for all his laconism, is a more comprehensive literary historian than Leo Tolstoy, and a master of multum in parvo (“much in little”):
Small as it is, Pushkin’s novel embraces an even larger and more colourful universe than Tolstoy’s whole vast canvas, for almost all the latter’s characters are aristocrats and officers, whereas Pushkin teases out of the void individuals of every social class, servants, popes [priests] and brigands, undistinguished petty officers, hesitant old generals. Each of them is given, it is true, only a few lines of text; but their description, however 14cursory, is enough to stamp them indelibly on our minds. There they are in two lines and three phrases. We know every inch of them. We can imagine their past and future, we can invent hundreds of little incidents of which they might be the protagonists… We think we have read one line, but behind that line we have read pages and pages of floating commentary.
This strange thing has been done before by the same writer, but largely in poetry. It is astonishing to think that Pushkin’s one true novel, Yevgeny Onegin, is in terms of word-counting 40 per cent shorter than The Captain’s Daughter. Yet it is even more replete with rounded portraits and memorable incidents captured in miniature.
Permit me to tell a story that illustrates the danger of mistaking Pushkinian simplicity for childishness. My own experience here was unfortunate. On a military Russian interpreters’ course two generations ago, we zoomed from zero to Advanced Level in three months and sat the latter exam. I came fourteenth out of fourteen on a course of high-flyers, and even I, the tail-end Charlie (it was an RAF course), got a Distinction. But the trouble was that we read The Captain’s Daughter as a set text in a children’s edition published by Detgiz (the Soviet State Publishing House of Children’s Literature) in 1952 containing illustrations by S. Gerasimov and a few useful footnotes. I still have that copy, and I have reused it for this translation. The problem was that I took forward into later life 15an idea that this work was written for fourteen-year-old boys and girls. That impression is confirmed by any number of unfortunate translations which use archaic, stilted or unnatural language. This is especially off-putting in the rendering of direct speech. On no account should the translator have a character exclaim, “Wait, accursed ones! Wait!” or refer to a murdering bandit as a rascal or a scoundrel. Those are terms we use with children; by contrast, “villain” is usable in a grown-up context because it is still widely used in adult discourse if we are to judge by thrillers on TV.
One way or another the rather limited appreciation of The Captain’s Daughter stayed with me well into my career as a Pushkin specialist, though I now repudiate it with all strength. I can now recommend this book as an admirable novella written in his full maturity by a man born for the best in literature and deeply experienced in its ways and means. Far from appealing only to young minds, it calls for a sophisticated readership.
The separate set pieces of the story need to be thought through and threaded together. There is some wonderful portraiture, mostly in miniature. Troyat has explained how to do this. Hints and signals must be picked up and built into pictures larger than seem to be available. Only a few moments of reflection will fill out our knowledge of so many characters, situations and incidents: the Grinyov and Mironov families, life in a garrison town and an insurgent stronghold, at a posting station and a wayside inn, even the tiniest glimpse of 16life at court itself. What is remarkable is the preponderance of very ordinary people, unexceptional in quality (until, in some cases, severely tested) yet as real as your friends and neighbours. They are for the most part plain and unheroic, though a good number discover depths of character that they would never have guessed at without seeing day-to-day experience brutally distorted into unimaginable danger and cruelty. This applies to the two central positive characters, Pyotr and Masha, who would seem poor choices for hero and heroine because they are so young, inexperienced and, frankly, uninteresting, until wrenched from late adolescence into worldly maturity.
Anyone who reads this work with attention and reflection will gain a generous picture of Russian reality and human complexity, as well as close familiarity with a great upheaval of lasting importance in Russian history. Despite its modest character and pretensions, it shows the country in geographical breadth and socio-historical depth, ranging far from west to east and showing characters as lofty as the grand empress of Russia in action and as lowly as a brutally tortured Bashkir grotesquely disfigured and now coming up for another terrible flogging (which is mercifully abandoned).
Naturally enough, there are some noticeable shortcomings in the work, deriving directly from its laconic manner. The lack of substantiating detail, although a great strength in, for example, the dreadful hanging of the Belogorsk leadership, is painfully obvious on other occasions, such as the 17silly way in which the Belogorsk fortress is allowed to be overrun (in Chapter VII) when the commandant and one or two other brave men rush out madly to confront the enemy instead of concentrating on defence. The vile and vicious Shvabrin is unnecessarily simplified in his villainy, and as for Pugachov, although we can accept arbitrary decisions and sudden contradictions from a man with such a volatile and volcanic personality, the number of critical occasions when he allows the chips to fall in Grinyov’s favour are hard to swallow without further justification.
The style of this work is almost embarrassingly simple, yet in the last analysis it proves effective by being so endearing. Purporting to be a personalized memoir, the account reads like the recollections of a simple-minded soul caught up in a national crisis but innocent enough to report everything with naive honesty even when events make him look stupid or wrong, or both. He certainly does not sound like a historian, least of all when quoting letters from his father, interpolating personal comments, supplying jokey or ironical epigraphs, apologizing for not remembering things too clearly or tantalizing the reader as he does at the end of Chapter X: “But then an idea flashed through my mind. What it was ‘the reader will discover in the following chapter’, as novelists of old used to say.”
Another surprising feature of this work is that long sections of it, including moments of crisis, are conducted in dialogue. This is not what you might expect from a historical 18novella, which would seem to demand lengthy sections of prose for the establishment of context, character and incident. There is a double form of transference at work here. The author, Alexander Pushkin, transfers narrative responsibility to the main protagonist, who transfers it in turn to participants in the story by ostensibly reporting what they say as much as what they do. This has a doubly softening and warming effect on the whole narrative process, placing it much nearer to a chat in the pub than a written discourse or lecture from podium or pulpit. In literary terms, this is summertime and the reading is easy.
One last word about judging the quality of The Captain’s Daughter. Looking back down the reversed perspective of literary history, we encounter War and Peace three decades before we get back to Pushkin’s novella. Since they are both works of historical fiction we are bound to compare the two works, at least subconsciously. This is unfair to Pushkin. A more appropriate comparison would be between Pushkin and the longer-lived Walter Scott or Jane Austen, whose preoccupations, strengths and weaknesses do not occlude his significant achievement.
We can safely say that, for all its agonizing twists and turns, this is the least formidable historical romance you could wish to encounter. In retrospect, you will be astonished that such a series of grisly experiences could have been recounted with such economy and even elegance. John Bayley’s comment on Pushkin’s skill is well judged:19
In The Captain’s Daughter, as in any series of episodes from life, the events are not clear, the time is not short, the characters are not simple. It is Pushkin’s artistic achievement to make them appear so.
Perhaps Anna H. Semeonoff was justified in her comprehensive judgement, made as long ago as 1937, that “The Captain’s Daughter, in respect of its historical interest, as well as its literary quality, is one of the finest short novels of its kind”.
anthony briggs
Brinkworth, Wiltshire, August 202020
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
22
Preserve your honour from your youngest years.
proverb
I
Sergeant of the Guards
“This new lad, sir—straight on to captain from cadet?”
“No, slow things down a bit. He needs to toil and sweat.”
“Fine, leave him in the ranks—we’ll do that, if you’d rather.”
“I’m glad you see the point… Remind me—who’s his father?”
ya. v. knyazhnin
My father, Andrey Petrovich Grinyov, served under Count Münnich in his youth and retired at the rank of Lt Colonel in 17—. From then on he lived in his Simbirsk village, where he married a young girl by the name of Avdotya Vasilyevna Yu——, the daughter of a local landowner in reduced circumstances. I was one of nine children born to them. All of my brothers and sisters died young.
Mama was still pregnant with me when I was enrolled as sergeant in the Semyonovsky Regiment through a close relative who was a serving major with the Guards. If my mother had given birth to a daughter—Heaven forfend!—Father 24would have immediately reported the death of an absentee Guards sergeant, and that would have put an end to the matter. I was classified as being on leave until my basic education was completed. At five years of age I was entrusted to Savelich, my father’s senior huntsman, who became my personal tutor in acknowledgement of his sober conduct. By my twelfth year, under his instruction, I had learnt to read and write Russian and become quite an expert in assessing the qualities of a borzoi wolfhound. It was then that Father took on a Frenchman for my benefit, a Monsieur Beaupré sent to us from Moscow along with our year’s supply of wine and olive oil. His arrival met with marked disapproval from Savelich. “For heaven’s sake,” he growled under his breath, “the lad is washed, groomed and fed. Why on earth waste any more money hiring a Monsewer? Don’t we have enough people of our own?”
Beaupré had worked as a barber in his own country, done some soldiering in Prussia, and then come to Russia pour être outchitel, without really knowing what the word meant (“to be a teacher”). He was a nice enough young man, but irresponsible and completely out of control. He had a particular weakness for the fair sex, which meant suffering rebuffs that left him moaning for days on end. He was also, as he said himself, “no enemy of the bottle”. In other words, to put it plainly, he drank too much. However, we had wine served only at dinner, one tiny glass per person, and even then he was bypassed more often than not. Monsieur Beaupré 25soon got used to drinking our home-flavoured vodka, and it was not long before he preferred this to wine from his own country and considered our concoction much better for the digestion. We took to each other straight away and, although he was contracted to teach me “French, German and all the sciences”, he preferred to pick up a smattering of spoken Russian from me, and beyond that we went our own separate ways. We were kindred spirits and I wanted no other mentor. But fate was soon to separate us, and this is how it came about.
There came a time when our washerwoman, Palashka, a buxom girl with a pockmarked face, somehow arrived at a joint decision with the one-eyed dairymaid, Akulka: to throw themselves on Mother’s mercy by confessing to criminal weakness and tearfully accusing the Monsieur of exploiting their innocence by seducing them. Mother thought this was no joking matter, and she complained to my father. A believer in rough justice, he sent for the disgusting Frenchman. On hearing that the man was busy teaching me, he came straight to my room. At the time Beaupré was stretched out on the bed, sleeping like a babe. I was busy, with a job to do. I ought to tell you that a big map of the world had been obtained for me from Moscow, only for it to hang there on the wall, completely unused. It had long been tempting me with its big spread and high-quality paper. I had decided to make a kite out of it, and with Beaupré asleep I was able to get on with the job. Father came in just as I was fastening a tail of 26thin bark onto the Cape of Good Hope. Taking one look at my geographical studies, Father grabbed me by my ear and twisted it, ran over to Beaupré, shook him awake and laid into him. Beaupré was shocked by this but he couldn’t get up: the wretched Frenchman was dead drunk. In for a penny, in for a pound. Father hauled him up by the scruff of his neck, threw him out of the room and sent him on his way in short order, to Savelich’s indescribable joy. This was the end of my education.
I lived and behaved like any nobleman’s young son, chasing pigeons and playing leapfrog with the farm lads. Soon after, I turned sixteen. Then came a change of fate.
One autumn day Mother was bottling honey in the parlour, and I was licking my lips at the sight of the bubbling froth. Father was over by the window, perusing the Court Calendar, which he received once a year. This book always had a strong effect on him: he could never read it without feeling deeply disturbed, and the act of reading always roused him to a bitter outpouring of emotion. Mother, who knew all the ins and outs of his character only too well, always tried to keep the wretched volume tucked away as safely as she could, which meant that sometimes the Court Calendar escaped his attention for months at a time. But whenever he did come across it, he wouldn’t let go of it for hours on end. And now, as he went on reading from the Court Calendar, he would shrug his shoulders and mutter under his breath things like, “Him, a lieutenant general!… A regimental sergeant under 27me!… And now he’s a knight of both Russian orders!… It’s not that long since he and I were…” Eventually, Father flung the Calendar down on the sofa and relapsed into a pensive mood that promised anything but good.
Suddenly he turned to Mother. “Our young Pyotr, how old is he now?”
“Going on seventeen,” Mother replied. “Our little Pyotr was born in the same year that Auntie Nastasya went blind in one eye. It was then that—”
“Splendid!” said Father, cutting in. “Time he joined the army. He’s had enough chasing maids and clambering all over the pigeon loft.”
At the thought of losing me so soon Mother dropped her spoon into the saucepan and tears were soon rolling down her cheeks. Quite the opposite with me: my excitement was beyond description. The idea of army life blended with ideas of freedom and all the pleasures of life in St Petersburg. I could see myself as a sergeant of the Guards, which I looked forward to as the summit of human happiness.
Father was not given to changing his mind or brooking any delay. The time of my departure was fixed. The day before, Father announced his intention to write to my future commanding officer, and called for pen and paper.
