No, it was not that; what troubled him was merely the very real, mathematical consideration that no matter how the knight might wield his sword and no matter how strong he might be, he still could not overcome an army of a hundred thousand in the course of a few hours, or even in a day, having killed all of them to the last man. And yet such things were written in these trustworthy books. Therefore, they must have lied.
And if there is one lie, then it is all a lie. How, then, can truth be saved? And so, to save the truth he invents another fantasy; but this one is twice, thrice as fantastic as the first one, cruder and more absurd; he invents hundreds of thousands of imaginary men having the bodies of slugs, which the knight’s keen blade can pass through ten times more easily and quickly than it can an ordinary human body. And thus realism is satisfied, truth is saved, and it’s possible to believe in the first and most important dream with no more doubts – and all this, again, is solely thanks to the second, even more absurd fantasy, invented only to salvage the realism of the first one.
Ask yourselves: hasn’t the same thing happened to you, perhaps, a hundred times in the course of your life? Say you’ve come to cherish a certain dream, an idea, a theory, a conviction, or some external fact that struck you, or, at last, a woman who has enchanted you. You rush off in pursuit of the object of your love with all the intensity your soul can muster.
It’s true that no matter how blinded you may be, no matter how well your heart bribes you, still, if in the object of your love there is a lie, a delusion, something that you yourself have exaggerated and distorted because of your passion and your initial rush of feeling – solely so that you can make it your idol and bow down to it – then, of course, you’re aware of it in the depths of your being; doubt weighs upon your mind and teases it, ranges through your soul and prevents you from living peaceably with your beloved dream. Now, don’t you remember, won’t you admit even to yourself what it was that suddenly set your mind at rest? Didn’t you invent a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude one, perhaps, but one that you were quick to embrace lovingly only because it resolved your initial doubt?
Pushkin (A Sketch)
(August 1880)
Excerpt from a speech delivered on June 8, 1880 at a Meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature
. . . Everywhere in Pushkin we perceive a faith in the Russian character, a faith in its spiritual power; and if there is faith, then there must be hope as well, a great hope for the Russian: ‘With hopes for glory and for good, / I look ahead and have no fear,’ said the poet himself when speaking of another subject; but these words of his can be applied directly to the whole of his creative activity drawn from his nation. And never has any Russian writer, before him or since, been so akin in spirit to his People as was Pushkin.
Oh, we have many experts on the People among our writers, ones who write with such talent, so aptly and so lovingly about the People; and yet if one compares them with Pushkin, they are, truly (with perhaps two exceptions from his latest followers), merely ‘gentlemen’ who write about the People.
The most talented of these, even these two exceptions I just mentioned, will now and then suddenly show a haughty attitude, something from another world and another way of life, something that shows a wish to raise the People to their own level and make them happy by doing so. In Pushkin there is precisely something that truly makes him akin to the People, something that reaches almost the level of simple-hearted tenderness. Take his ‘Tale of the Bear’ and the peasant who killed his ‘lady bear,’ or recall the verses ‘Brother Ivan, when you and I start drinking,’ and you will see what I mean.
Our great poet left all these treasures of art and artistic vision as signposts for the artists who came after him and for those who would toil in the same fields as he. One can positively state that had Pushkin not existed neither would the talented people who came after him.
At least they, despite their great gifts, would not have made their presence felt with such power and clarity of expression as they did later, in our time. But the point is not merely in poetry and not merely in creative work: had Pushkin not existed, it might well be that our faith in our Russian individuality, our now conscious hope in the strength of our People, and with it our faith in our future independent mission in the family of European peoples would not have been formulated with such unshakeable force (this did happen later, but was by no means universal and was felt by merely a few). This feat of Pushkin’s becomes particularly evident if one studies what I call the third period of his creative work.
Once more, I repeat: these periods do not have such firm boundaries. Some of the works of even this third period could have appeared at the very beginning of our poet’s career, because Pushkin was always a complete, integrated organism, so to say, an organism bearing all its beginnings within itself and not acquiring them from without. The outside world only aroused in him those things already stored in the depths of his soul.
But this organism did develop, and the particular nature of each of the periods of this development actually can be shown and the gradual progression from one period to the next indicated. Thus, to the third period belongs the series of works in which universal ideas shine forth most brightly, which reflect the poetic images of other nations and which incarnate their genius. Some of these works appeared only posthumously.
And in this period of his career our poet stands forth as an almost miraculous and unprecedented phenomenon, never before seen anywhere else. In fact, the European literatures had creative geniuses of immense magnitude – the Shakespeares, Cervanteses, and Schillers. But show me even one of these great geniuses who possessed the capacity to respond to the whole world that our Pushkin had.
And it is this capacity, the principal capacity of our nationality, that he shares with our People; and it is this, above all, that makes him a national poet. The very greatest of these European poets could never exemplify as intensely as Pushkin the genius of another people – even a people that might be near at hand – the spirit of that people, all the hidden depths of that spirit and all its longing to fulfill its destiny. On the contrary, when the European poets dealt with other nationalities they most often instilled in them their own nationality and interpreted them from their own national standpoint.
Even Shakespeare’s Italians, for instance, are almost to a man the same as Englishmen. Pushkin alone, of all the poets of the world, possesses the quality of embodying himself fully within another nationality. Take his ‘Scenes from Faust,’ his ‘Covetous Knight,’ his ballad ‘Once There Lived a Poor Knight.’ Read ‘Don Juan’ once more, and were it not for Pushkin’s name on it you would never guess that it had not been written by a Spaniard.
What profound, fantastic images there are in the poem ‘A Feast in Time of Plague!’ But in these fantastic images you hear the genius of England; this marvellous song sung by the poem’s hero about the plague, this song of Mary with the verses, ‘Once the noisy school rang out, / With the voices of our children,’ these English songs, this longing of the British genius, this lament, this agonizing presentiment of the future. Just recall the strange verses: ‘Once, wandering ’midst a valley wild . . .’
This is almost a literal reworking of the first three pages of a strange, mystical book written in prose by one ancient English religious sectarian – but is it merely a reworking? In the melancholy and rapturous music of these verses one senses the very soul of northern Protestantism, of an English heresiarch whose mysticism knows no bounds, with his dull, gloomy, and compelling strivings and with all the unchecked force of mystical visions.
Reading these strange verses, you seem to sense the spirit of the age of the Reformation; you begin to understand this militant fire of incipient Protestantism; you begin to understand, finally, the history itself, and understand it not only rationally but as though you had been there yourself, had passed through the armed camp of sectarians, sung hymns with them, wept with them in their mystical ecstasies, and shared their beliefs.
Incidentally, right next to this religious mysticism we find other religious stanzas from the Koran, or ‘Imitations of the Koran’: do we not find a real Moslem here? Is this not the very spirit of the Koran and its
