1 2 3 4 5

II

But there is another Pugachev—the Pugachev of The History of the Pugachev Revolt.35 The Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter and the Pugachev of The History of the Pugachev Revolt.

They would seem to be one—seeing as they were written by one and the same hand. No, not by one and the same hand. A poet wrote the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter; the Pugachev of The History of the Pugachev Revolt came from—a prose writer. And that is why we don't have one Pugachev.

Just as you can't help but be spellbound by the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter, so too you can't help but be repulsed by the Pugachev of The Pugachev Revolt.

The first is complete gratitude and nobility; against the background of his own bestial deeds, the constant and consistent victory of good. All Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter is seized and presented in circumstances that are exceptional for Pugachev in their goodness, in the exceptional circumstances of love. "I will execute them all," he says, "but I will have mercy on you." And at the same time that "you," through the character of human nature and the brilliance of the author's suggestion, consistently designates the reader himself. (He executed them all, but he had mercy on me, he look everything away, but he gave to me, and so on.) Pugachev, in the person of Grinev, has forgiven us everything. Therefore, we forgive him everything.

What remains in our minds from The Captain's Daughter? His mercy. Executions, plundering, fires? It would seem that Pugachev is presented as black only in order to better, more cleanly, present him as white.

Let us suppose— and of course that is how it was with all of us— that the reader read The Captain's Daughter first. What does he expect from The History of the Pugachev Revolt? The same Pugachev, more of the same Pugachev, more, that is, of his goodness, broadness, mercy, wildness— and the reader's own love.

And here is what, from the first pages of the narration he gets:

"... Meanwhile they had already set up a gallows behind the fortress; before it sat Pugachev, accepting the oath of the inhabitants and the garrison. They brought Kharlov (the commandant of the fortress— M.Ts.) crazed from his wounds and pouring with blood. One eye, which had been knocked out of its socket by a lance, was hanging on his cheek. Pugachev ordered them to execute him."

(He ordered them to execute Mironov too, but Mironov did not have an eye hanging down his cheek. The nauseating power

of details.)

A day later Pugachev took the next fortress in line, Ta-tischeva, along with the commandant, Elagin.

"From Elagin, a stout man, they flayed the skin: the villains took the fat off of him and greased their own wounds with it."

(In The Captain's Daughter they didn't flay the skin off anyone and did not grease their wounds with anyone's fat. For Pushkin knew that that grease would make the reader feel nauseous revulsion— against his hero.) One line further on:

"His wife they hacked to bits. Their daughter, Kharlova, who had been widowed the day before, was brought to the conqueror who had dealt out the execution of her parents. Pugachev was struck by her beiuty and took the unfortunate woman as his concubine, having mercy for her sake on her seven-year-old brother."

A small bit of mercy and a purely villainous act, a crass piece of villainy too: driven by lust he spared her, spared her for his own use. And the instantaneous reaction: Our Pugachcv would not have acted that way, our Pugachev, once he loved, would have freed her to the four corners of the earth—without touching her hand... In fact, it was not a^ feeling of love, but the whim of lust, since he ordered the widow of Major Belovsky, whom he did not lust for, strangled on the spot.

But to this episode with Kharlova (her maiden name is Elagina) there is a continuation—and an ending.

A few pages later—I don't know whether it's weeks or months—the following takes place:

"Young Kharlova had the misfortune to make the Pretender attached to her. He kept her in his camp near Orenburg. She alone had the right at any time to go into his kibitka; at her request he sent an order to Ozernaia to bury the bodies of those he had hanged when the fortress was taken. She stirred up the suspicions of the jealous rebels and Pugachev, giving way to their demands, handed his concubine over to them. Kharlova and her seven-year-old brother were shot. Wounded, they crawled to each other and embraced. Their bodies, thrown into the bushes, remained a long time in that state."

All the spells are gone. Greasing your wounds with another person's fat, shooting a seven-year-old child, who crawls bleeding to his sister—a work of literature can't bear that, it casts that out. Pushkin, by his artistry, was sentenced to a different Pugachev.

That is Pugachev in love. Pushkin remembered Kharlova when he was writing The Captain's Daughter for (Marya Ivanovna's letter to Grinev): "He [Shvabrin] treats me very cruelly and threatens that if I don't change my mind and don't agree, he'll bring me to the villain in his camp, and you, he says to me, will get the same treatment as Lizaveta Kharlova..."

What that same treatment is Pushkin does not specify in The Captain's Daughter, leaving the reader to surmise only the beginning of Kharlova's fate. It is too disadvantageous here for him to vivify those bushes.

And immediately, line to line, before the episode with Kharlova:

"Pugachev, at the beginning of his revolt, took in Sergeant Karmitsky as a scribe, pardoning him right under the gallows. Karmitsky soon became his favorite. When they took the Tatishchev fortress, the Cossaks of the Yaik strangled him and threw him with a stone on Ins neek into the water. Pugachev inquired about him. 'he's gone,' they answered him, 'to his mother down the Yaik River.' Pugachev waved his hand in silence."

That is Pugachev in friendship: in the love of men.

The fate of Karmitsky is the potential fate of Grinev himself: here is what would have happened to Grinev if he had met up with Pugachev not on the pages of The Captain's Daughter, but on the pages of The History of the Pugachev Revolt.*

Here Pugachev emerges as a moral coward— Lache— out of fear of his comrades he hands over—into their hands!—a beloved woman, an innocent child, and a beloved friend.

But wait—it seems familiar: a beloved woman... handed over to comrades... —Ah!

But around him rises murmuring:

—He's traded us for a woman!

He spent the night with a woman

And turned into one by morning

... With a mighty thrust he raises

Up the princess fair...

Stenka Razin!36 The man about whom and whom all Europe sings with our voice, the one with whom we, as if with water and misfortune, inundated all Europe, and of course, not only Europe but Africa too, and America, for there is no place on the whole earth where they might not be singing about him now or tomorrow.

But: Pugachev and Razin-what a difference!

Razin, the comrades laugh at; they tease Razin with his woman, touching his masculine ataman's pride. Pugachev, the comrades threaten, playing on the simple fear he feels for his life. And what different gesture's! (The whole difference between a deed and a crime.)

*In The History of the Pugachev Revolt there is also a Grinev, but there he is a second lieutenant and he does not meet up with Pugachev. —M.Ts.

With a mighty thrust he raises

Up the princess fair...

—Razin himself throws his beloved in the Volga, as a gift to the river, as the most beloved thing, raised up and thus—embraced; Pugachev gives his beloved to his ruffians to kill, he kills with other people's hands: drops his own hands. And he lets them torture not only her, but also her innocent brother, to whom, I have no doubt, he was already accustomed, whom he had already in some little way—taken in as a son.

In Razin's case—a misfortune; in Pugachev's—lowness. In Razin's case—the weakness of the warrior before public opinion, a weakness that swells up into heady courage; in Pugachev's case—a low grasping at life.

We feel pity for Razin because of his Persian lady; for Pugachev, because of Kharlova, we feel a shudder and contempt. We are sorry in that moment that they quartered him when he was already dead.

And, the people are the best judge: they sing about Razin and his Persian lady; about Pugachev and his Kharlova—they are mute.

The worthiness or unworthiness of a thing for song is perhaps the only infallible measure of its level.

But Pugachev did, it seems, an even lower deed. He ordered strangled one of his own faithful confederates, Dmitrii Lysov, with whom a few days previously, in a drunken state, he had had a spat and who had struck him with a lance. "Their comrades reconciled them and Pugachev was even drinking with Lysov a few hours before his death."

With Kharlova he slept—and gave her over to be shot; with Lysov he drank—and ordered him strangled. Pugachev emerges here as the worst of his own outlaws, worse than an outlaw. And only thus can one answer his angry outburst when the Cossack who betrayed him wanted to tie up his hands behind him: "Am I an outlaw?"

At times his aspect rises from the lowness of villainy to the diabolical:

"Pugachev was hastening along the bank of the Volga. There he met the astronomer Lovits and asked what sort of man he was. When he heard that Lovits observed the course of the heavenly bodies, he ordered him hanged—to be nearer to the stars.

And-the last thing. "Before the court he displayed an unexpected weakness of spirit. They were obliged to prepare him gradually to hear the sentence of death"... "crainte qu'il ne morut de peur sur le champ," Catherine explains in a letter to Voltaire.37 But since Catherine's letter is Pushkin's sole source, and Catherine obviously had a vested interest in the lowness of the rebel executed by her, let us leave that report under suspicion: maybe he was cowardly, maybe not. But what can be said with confidence is that he was not striking in his courage before death. You cannot succeed with a lie of cowardice against a brave man. Even Catherine in a letter to Voltaire.

But there is one more detail of that execution, a heavy one. Pugachev, being a raskolnik, a member of a dissident sect,38 had never gone to church, but in the moment of execution-according to the whole people's testimony— he frequently made the sign of the cross gazing at the churches.

He could not endure spiritual isolation; he gave up his old faith.

After the beloved woman and the friend, he also gave up his faith.

* * * * *

Let us be fair. I did select (and it wasn't necessary even to specially select) reversed, contrasting instances with the Pugachev of The Captain's Daughter. Pushkin left the Pugachev of The History of the Pugachev Revolt a great deal. He left him his round-about, folk-tale way of talking, left him the unexpected changes of disposition: for instance he turns around the cannon brought up against the inhabitants and shoots it off into the steppe. He left him physical bravery:

"Pugachev was riding ahead of his army. 'Be careful, your Highness,' an old Cossack told him, 'they just might kill you with a cannon shot.' 'You are an old-timer,' answered the Pretender. 'Are cannons fired at Tsars?' '

He left the love for him of the common folk:

"The soldiers fed him from their own hands and would tell the children who pressed close around his cage: 'Remember, children, that you saw Pugachev.' The old people still tell stories about his bold answers to the questions of landowners riding by. All along the way he was cheerful and calm."

He left him both the fiery look and the frightening voice, from which the women who came to look at him in the cage would faint senseless.

And, however strange, he left him his humanity too: Academician Rychkov, the father of the Simbirsk commandant whom Pugachev had killed, could not hold back the tears when he spoke about his son. Looking at him, Pugachev himself started to cry.

But he also left him that continual grasping at life. For, in Pugachev's answer to Rychkov's question about how he could summon the daring for such huge evil deeds: "I am guilty before God and the Empress and I will try to serve out all my wrongs," there is a senseless, knowingly-hopeless hope for pardon, always Pugachev's same grasping at life.

The Pugachev of The History of the Pugachev Revolt emerges as an animal and not a hero. But he does not even emerge as a natural animal because almost all his bestial deeds are fear for life; rather, he emerges as one who allows bestial deeds, as a man weak to the point of criminality. (Even Lysov's murder, after all, is not revenge on a hand raised against him, but fear of a second, and this time mortal blow.)

And, so as finally to finish about him: to finish him off in our hearts—one ugly scene, twice-over ugly, with all the fullness of knavery in the person of both participants:

Count Panin, to whom they brought the captured Pugachev, strikes Pugachev on the face drawing blood, and he tears out a tuft of his beard (N.B.! the Russian "You don't strike a fallen man") in response to a bold, folk-proverbial, prophetic answer from Pugachev: "I am the raven's fledgling, but the raven is still flying."

And what does Pugachev do? He gets down on his knees and begs for pardon.

* * * * *

And now, a confrontation of dates: The Captain's Daughter -1836; The History of the Pugachev Revolt-1834.

And our first bewildered question: how did Pushkin write his own Pugachev—knowing?
If it had been the reverse, that is, had The Captain's Daughter been written first, it would be natural: Pushkin first imagined his own Pugachev and then found. (Like every poet—in love.) But here he first found out, and then imagined.

35. Pushkin entitled his work The History of Pugachev (Istoriia Pugacheva). It was published in 1834 with the title given to it by Nicholas I, The History of the Pugachev Revolt (Istoriia Pugachevskogo bunta).

36. The seventeenth-century brigand and popular revolutionary leader. In 1670 Razin began a campaign of revolt directed against the boyars and landlords. It was initially successful and spread (like Pugachev's revolt) all along the Volga, from the mouth of the river to Simbirsk. He was surrendered to the government by the conservative Cossacks and executed in 1671. Tsvetaeva wrote a cycle of three poems on Stenka Razin in April-May 1917. The cycle was printed in the same issue of Russian Notes as "Pushkin and Pugachev" and preceeded by lines from the prose work: "The people sing of Razin and his Persian lady / About Pugachev and his Kharlova they are mute." The lines quoted here are not from Tsvetaeva's poems, however, nor are they from Pushkin's cycle, "Songs on Stenka Razin" ("Pesni o StenTce Razine"), 1826. The words are part of a popular song still sung today in the Soviet Union.

37. French. "For fear that he might die of fright on the spot." Catherine's letter to Voltaire of October 22,1774, is cited by Pushkin in his "History of Pugachev."

38. Not all historians agree that Pugachev was actually a dissident, that is, one of the raskol'niki, who regarded the Russian Orthodox Church and its rituals as corrupted, and who did not recognize the authority of the Orthodox Patriarch. However, Pugachev was favorable to the claims of the sectarians, many of whom lived along the Volga in the territory where the revolt flourished.