1 2 3 4 5

Ridiculous, but not laughable (just as Dickens makes his Mister Pickwick in the beginning of the novel), touching, childishly ridiculous: a child who reads a letter upside down. Pushkin's Pugachev comes out as some kind of animal-like child, blameless in himself, blameless in evil. Compare Pushkin's attitude to the low villain Shvabrin: not one human weakness, not one mitigating circumstance. All villain from one— black— piece, like Victor Hugo's Javer20 (except for the latter's final gesture). Shvabrin is the villain born of Pushkin's intent, he is Pushkin's real opposite, his real enemy, that is, his low enemy. But Pugachev is the villain born of Pushkin's love, the enemy born of Pushkin's love, despite everything and everyone, not his enemy at all, his non-enemy, his friend and almost his passion.

Here is plain to see the whole difference for a poet between an outward enemy and an inner enemy. Shvabrin—lowness personified—is his inner enemy. Pugachev is his historical, factual enemy, his outward enemy, his complete non-enemy, his friend, whom by military duty you have to kill, but whom you can't not love.

Like the Attic soldier

In love with his enemy...21

Said about a soldier, but this far-distant soldier (Achilles) was created—by a poet.

But there is one thing more, besides the spell, the physical spell over Pushkin—of Pugachev: the passion of every poet for revolt, for revolt personified by one man. For the revolt of one head with two eyes. For one-headed, two-eyed revolt. For the one against all the many—and without all the many. For the one who oversteps the line.

Where there is no passion for the one who oversteps, there is no poet. (That this passion for overstepping turns up in a poet under a revolutionary regime as counter-revolution is natural seeing as those who are revolting turn up as the ruling power.)

In Pugachev, as nowhere else, this passion in Pushkin broke through, and it was silly of Nicholas I to expect from that historiographer- any kindness

All, all the fears that would destroy

Give mortal man the greatest joy

And secret bliss that overflow...

The mortal, immortal, African, boyar, human, divine, poor, already doomed heart of Pushkin took that inexplicable bliss for its own one year before it ceased to beat in the dreamed-of encounter of Grinev with Pugachev. In the self-styled Tsar-Em-elyan, Pushkin cleansed his soul of the Tsar-autocrat Nicholas who didn't know how either to embrace him or to release him. The passionate, faithful subject that Pushkin might have been did not find live sustenance, and he had, as in the tale told by that same Pugachev, to peck at dead carrion ("No, I am not a flatterer when to the Tsar..."22) but, as in that tale of Pugachev's, since he was an eagle, dead carrion was not for him and he had—once he had rejected the raven's prescription, one year after The Captain's Daughter and Pugachev's tale—to nourish the Russian snow with his own blood.23

We know the co-murderer.

* * * * *

I am obliged to Pushkin for my own passion for rebels, however they may be called and however garbed. For any enterprise—as long as it is doomed.

But I am obliged to Pushkin for one more thing—perhaps against his will. After The Captain's Daughter I could never again like Catherine II.24 I'll say more: I started disliking her.

The contrast between Pugachev's blackness and her whiteness, his liveliness and her self-importance, his cheerful goodness and her condescending goodness, his peasant ways and her lady's manners, could not help but turn a child's heart away from her, a heart that loved exclusively and was already inclined to "the villain."

Neither her goodness, nor her simplicity, nor her stoutness-nothing, nothing helped; to me (I being in that instant Masha) it was even repulsive to sit next to her on the bench.

Against Pugachev's flaming background—of fires, plundering, snowstorms, kibitkas, feasts—this woman, in the cap and sleeveless jacket, on the bench, among all sorts of nice little leaves and bridges, rose in my mind as a huge white fish, white-fish. And even unsalted whitefish. (Catherine's basic trait: an amazing lack of savor. Not one great utterance, not one utterance-of her own remained after she was gone, except the well-conceived inscription on Falconet's monument,25 that is, a signature. Only phrases. The Catherine of the French letters and the derivative comedies is human, is the model of a middling person.)

Let us compare Pugachev and Catherine out in waking daylight.

"Come forth, lovely maiden, I am giving you freedom. I am the Ruler." (Pugachev bringing Marya Ivanovna out of prison.)

"Excuse me, she said in a still more kindly voice—if I am interfering in your affairs, but I am often at the court..."

How much more regal in his gesture is the peasant who gives himself the name Ruler, than the ruler who presents herself as a hanger-on at court.

And what a different kindness! Pugachev comes into the prison—like the sun. But Catherine's kindliness even then seemed to me a lump of sweetness, sugariness, honey, and that still more kindly voice was simply flattering: false. I recognized in her and at once hated the lady-patroness.

And as soon as she started figuring in the book, it got drain-ingly-boring for me; from her whiteness, stoutness and goodness I felt physically sodden the way I do from cold cutlets or warm fish in white sauce that I know I will eat, but—how! For me the book fell into two pairs, into two marriages: Pugachev and Grinev, Catherine and Marya Ivanovna. And it would have been better to marry that way!

Does Pushkin like Catherine in The Captain's Daughter? I don't know. He is respectful towards her. He knew that all of it: whiteness, goodness, stoutness, are things respected. So he paid his respects.

But love... a spell in the figure of Catherine is absent. All Pushkin's love went to Pugachev (Grinev loves Masha but Pushkin doesn't); for Catherine there was left only an official respectfulness.

Catherine was needed so that everything "had a happy ending."

But for me both then and now, the work, the whole of it, ends with Pugachev's nod from the block. And further on it's all— details of the Grinev-business.

Grinev's business is to live on with Masha and to leave behind a happy brood in Simbirsk Province.

My business is to look endlessly at the thing that looms

black in the snowstorm.

* * * * *

In Blok there is a magic expression: secret heat. An expression that at the first reading set me afire with recognition: of myself before the age of seven, even before the age of seven (further on doesn't count because it didn't get any hotter). The expression is the key to my soul— and to all lyric poetry:

You curse in impossible sufferings

All your life because there is no one to love:

But there is an answer in my trembling poems

Their secret heat will help you to go on living.26

Help you to go on living. No! it is living. The secret heat means— to live.

And here and now, a lifetime later, I can state: everything in which there was no secret heat, I did not love. (Captain Scott27 had that secret heat too, the man who warmed his polar diaries with a final, secret— secret, just that— heat.)

All Pugachev is that secret heat. That secret heat in Pugachev's counter-figure, Catherine, is lacking. She had— cozy warmth.

I said: counter-figure. It is curious that all, decidedly all the figures of The Captain's Daughter, each in its own direction, is a counter-figure to Pugachev: the good robber Pugachev— the low villain Shvabrin; Pugachev rising against the Empress— the Commandant dying for that Empress; the savage wolf Pugachev— the devoted dog Savelich; the fiery Pugachev and the whitefish German general; right up to the contrast of Pugachev, who charms us physically, with his frightening gang (Khlopusha's torn nostrils). Pugachev and Catherine, finally. And it is still more curious that the counter-figure of Pugachev covers, suppresses, eclipses them all. Turns them all into figureheads.

Let us examine all the characters in The Captain's Daughter. The father and mother—just as they ought to be (Mama, Papa...); the servant Savelich—just as he ought to be; the gambler Zurin, the petty, envious man and denouncer Shvabrin; the professional German general; Commandant Mironov, an almost comic type, if he were not made to die before our eyes with honor...; Masha the unfilled blank space of every first love; Catherine—the unfilled blank space of every auctorial non-love...

Pushkin did not counterpose a single major figure to Pugachev (and he could have: Lieutenant Derzhavin,28 who nearly perished from Pugachev's lance; Suvorov,29 who kept watch a whole night over the captured Pugachev). In the best instance the others—are good people. But when—whom—did "goodness" save in literature, and who ever withstood the spell of power and the power of a spell? (By way of rebutting myself—once it did save and elevate: Father Savely in Cathedral Folk.30 By way, however, of reaffirming myself—but that is more than literature and more than goodness, and there is a power greater than the spell: holiness.)

In The Captain's Daughter the one and only dramatis persona--is Pugachev. The whole work comes to life at the ringing of his bell. We all look with wide eyes and listen with big ears: So then, something's going to happen? And whatever it might be: When Pugachev is there—we are there.

Pushkin's Pugachev, over and above the tribute of a poet to a spell, of a poet to an enemy, is also a tribute to an epoch: to Romanticism. Goethe has Getz, Schiller has Karl Moor,31 Pushkin has Pugachev. Yes, yes, that most classical, crystalline piece of, as you keep on calling it, prose—is the purest romanticism, the crystal of romanticism. Only those others sought and found their heroes either in the thickets of the past, thereby infinitely easing their set task and by using the remoteness of the times depriving them of the last jot of probability, or (Lermontov,32 Byron) they sought and found them in the bowels of lyrical chaos: they found them either in themselves or in the nowhere. But Pushkin took his hero both from outside himself and from the generation that preceded him (Pugachev is Pushkin's father in age), thereby making his set task infinitely more difficult. But on the other hand: Karl Moor and Getz, and Lara, and the Mtsyri, and Pushkin's own Aleko33 are ideas, in the best instance—visions; Pugachev is a living man. A living peasant. And this living peasant is the most unconquerable of all the romantic heroes Comparable only with another realistic hero, the forefather of the romantic ones: Don Quixote.

The tranqnility ol the narration and the restraint in the choice of words have maintained the adult reader for a whole century in a deception: it is just because of that that they gave it to seven-year-old children, because they thought—here's something classical. But the classical proved to be—magical, and the children understood, only the children, the children alone did understand, for there is no child not in love with the Pathfinder.

With the "classics"—they did not fall in love.

* * * * *

A retrospective epigraph to the whole of The Captain's Daughter:

...There are strange peasants—

...Sack in hand he travels along

Covering the road through the woods

With a song that is soft, drawn-out, long,

Bodes no good, bodes no good...

...Into our glorious capital

He enters—O Lord save us all!—

He casts his dark spell on the Empress

Of Russia, vast and boundless...34

Pugachev did not cast a spell on the Empress of boundless, vast Russia, but he did head for our other, more glorious capital, marched against her and did not enter the capital. The capitals are different—and the empresses, different-but the peasant is always the same. And the spell is the same... And in the same way, a hundred years later, one man submitted to that spell—a poet.

* * * * *

All Grinev's encounters with Pugachev are a series of living pictures, burned into the living flesh of our soul. A series of living pictures illuminated not by magnesium, but by lightning. Not by magnesium, but by magic. Oh, how thoroughly is that classical book— magical. How thoroughly— hypnotic, (for Pugachev, all of him, in spite of our reason and conscience, is forced upon us by Pushkin— breathed into us: we don't want to, but we see him; we don't want to, but we love him) so much is that book like sleep, like dreaming. All Grinev's encounters with Pugachev are from that same region of his dream about the killing and loving peasant. A dream prolonged and brought to life. It is because of that, perhaps, that we do give ourselves over to Pugachev, because it is a dream, that is, we are in the complete captivity and the complete freedom of a dream. The Commandant, Vasilisa Egorovna, Shvabrin, Catherine— all that is bright day and we, reading, remain of sane mind and memory. But as soon as Pugachev enters the scene— all that is over: it is black night.

Not the heroic Commandant, nor Vasilisa Egorovna who loves him, nor Grinev's love affair, no one and nothing can overcome in us Pugachev. Pushkin has brought Pugachev on us... the way you bring on sleep, a fever, a spell...
On that word, we close the discussion of the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter.

19. In Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite protects Paris with a cloud when he is defeated by Menelaus.

20. The villain of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables.

21. Lines from Osip Mandelstam's poem "Tennis" ("Tennis"), 1913. The lines read: Kak atticheskii soldat j v svoego vraga vliublennyi.. .

22. The opening line of Pushkin's "To My Friends" ("Druz'iam"), 1828. The poem was written when Pushkin was still under the spell of the favorable impression Nicholas I produced on him during their interview. In it Pushkin defends himself against charges that he is a flatterer when he praises the Tsar. On the contrary, Pushkin says, "I boldly express my feelings, /1 speak with the language of the heart."

23. A reference, of course, to Pushkin's fatal duel with d'Anthes.

24. Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great, reigned from 1762 to 1796.

25. A reference to Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great, known as The Bronze Horseman. (See Note 16 to "My Pushkin.") The monument was unveiled in 1782. The inscription, in Litin, reads: Petro Primo Catharina Secunda; MDCCLXXXII ("To Peter the First from Catherine the Second, 1782).

26. Lines from the poem of Alexander Blok, "Oh no, you cannot release.1 my heart from its spell" ("O, net, ne raskolduesh' serdtsa ty"). The stanza reads:

Ty proklianesh' v muchen'iakh nevozmozhnykh

Vsiu zhizn'za to, chto nekogo liubit'.

No est' otvet v moikh slikhakh trevozhnykh.

Ikh tainyi zhar tebe poinozhet zhit'.

The emphasis is Tsvetaeva's.

27. Robert Scott (1868-1912), an English explorer of the South Pole. His diaries were published in Russian in 1934.

28. The poet Gravriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) took part in the suppression of the Pugachev revolt.

29. The great Russian general, A. V. Suvorov (17927-1800). He took part in the campaign against Pugachev.

30. The novel Cathedral Folk (Soboriane) by Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (1831-1895) was one of Tsvetaeva's favorite works of prose.

31. The protagonist of Schiller's Die Rauber.

32. The romantic poet and novelist Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (1814-1841).

33. The protagonist of Pushkin's "Gypsies."

34. A citation from Nikolai Gumilev's poem, "The Peasant" ("Muzhik"). Tsve-taeva also mentions this poem at some length in "The History of a Dedication" where she says the peasant is in fact Rasputin. The Russian reads:

... Strannye est' muzhiki-

... Vot on, s dorozhnoi kotomkoi,

Put' oglashaet lesnoi

Pesn 'iu protiazhnoi, negromkoi,

I ozornoi, ozornoi...

... V slavnuiu nashu stolitsu

Vkhodit-Gospod' upasi!-

Obvorozhaet Tsaritsu
Neobozrimoi Rusi...