Lensky, the poet, is, like Onegin, part of Pushkin himself, writing the kind of elegiac poetry that his creator had written in an earlier phase and that recurs in the digressions. But there is also an exalted strain in him that belongs, on the one hand, to the civic Romanticism associated with the Decembrists and, on the other, to the libertarian ideals brought back from his studies in Göttingen. In the text Pushkin chooses a more prosaic future for Lensky, had he lived – that of the gouty, cuckolded landowner. It is unlikely that this Lensky could be added to Edmund Wilson’s list of poets unable survive in a world of ‘prose’, since he is not of their mould, and his alternative future – to become another Ryleyev, Nelson, Kutuzov – is left tongue-in-cheek in the omitted stanza. Among the epithets attaching to Lensky are: ‘virginal’, ‘pure’, ‘sweet’, ‘tender’, ‘rapturous’, ‘exalted’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘inspired’, ‘ardent’, simple’. The words ‘vague’, ‘obscure’, ‘limp’, ‘ideal’, ‘tearful’ apply to his poetry. The subjects of his verse are ‘love’, ‘despond’, ‘parting’, ‘graves’, even ‘Romantic roses’. The last image of him is his own grave. He and Tatiana share to some extent a similar sensibility. Not for nothing does she refer to Onegin as ‘the slayer of her brother’ (Chapter VII, stanza 14).
Olga, too, has her linguistic aura, more limited than those of the main characters. These vocabularies have their counterparts in European literature. Tatiana’s and Onegin’s reading are entirely European. The comic Russian debate on the merits of the ode and elegy contextualize Lensky’s poetry in Chapter IV (stanzas 32–4). These ramifications extend the range of the characters, turning them from individuals into types. Nor is it just a linguistic matter. Pushkin is quite serious about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary Western literature and its baleful effect upon vulnerable young female readers in Russia. In testing the characters against these influences Pushkin creates a clearing-house for a new, as yet undefined literature. But this clearing-house was to become its greatest monument. In his novel-in-verse Pushkin takes the same path of ‘lost illusions’ as Balzac was to do. Lensky is pointlessly killed without becoming either a hero or a cuckold; Onegin is left stranded at the end of the novel. Tatiana alone adapts herself sorrowfully to the high society she loathes, unlike the heroines of her favourite novels who die in order to save their integrity.
4
The Romantic narratives that Pushkin wrote in the first four years of his exile throw more light on the place that the novel-inverse occupies in Pushkin’s life and work. Written under the influence of Byron’s early ‘Southern’ poems (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Corsair, The Giaour – all referred to in Onegin), each bears the imprint of exile. A fortuitous holiday took Pushkin away from Kishinev at the beginning of his exile to the Caucasus and the Crimea in the company of a friendly family, the Rayevskys. From them he discovered Byron and was helped by the English governess and the sons and daughters of the family to read him in English, of which he had no previous knowledge. However, he never developed sufficient mastery of English to read Byron satisfactorily in the original and depended on French prose translations. Two of his Romantic poems, The Captive of the Caucasus (1820–21) and The Fountain at Bakhchisaray (1821–3), germinated in this exotic environment. The first directly anticipates Onegin in its aim ‘to depict that indifference to life and its pleasures, that premature ageing of the soul, which are the distinctive features of the youth of the nineteenth century’.10 A nameless nobleman, fleeing into nature from the constraints of civilization, falls captive to a Caucasian tribe among whom he languishes amid the splendours of the mountain scenery. Emotionally dead, he cannot respond to the local girl who helps him to escape across a river and drowns herself while he looks on without response. He is an early Onegin, lethal to himself and others, yet elegiac rather than demonic in disposition. Just as he bears no name, so he is hardly a character, which Pushkin was the first to admit. The poem is more a series of lyrical and descriptive fragments. One of these is an invocation to freedom by the Prisoner that appealed to the young Decembrists:
Ah freedom! It was you alone
He sought still in the desert world;
With feeling driven out by passions,
Grown cool to dreams and to the lyre,
He listened with excitement to
The songs inspired by you, and full
Of faith, of fiery supplication,
Your august idol he embraced.11
If Onegin did join the Decembrists in the fragmentary Chapter X, as some scholars suppose, then this passage anticipates how he might have felt on the rebound of his disappointed love for Tatiana.
A more demonic figure, this time with a name, Aleko, a perhaps conscious variant of Pushkin’s first name, appears in The Gipsies (1824), written concurrently with the first chapters of Onegin. When living in Kishinev, Pushkin had apparently spent several weeks with a roving gipsy tribe. In this poem a disaffected Russian nobleman once more seeks refuge in a more natural way of life, this time in a gipsy encampment, where he returns the attentions of a fiery young woman, Zemphira, who, through Prosper Mérimée’s translation, was to become the prototype for Bizet’s Carmen. When, after two years, Zemphira tires of him and takes a younger gipsy lover, Aleko, in a fit of jealousy, kills them both. Zemphira’s father, the Elder of the tribe, dismisses him with the sentence: ‘You want freedom for yourself alone’,12 a phrase repeated by Dostoyevsky to condemn what he diagnosed as the corrosive individualism infecting Russia from the West. Pushkin’s Tatiana, he pointed out, refused the freedom Onegin offered so as not to build her happiness on the unhappiness of her husband. Both the indifference of the captive and the possessiveness of Aleko enter into Onegin’s character – from his dismissal of Tatiana’s early love for him to his overwhelming passion for her when she is married and distinguished. Already in her dream, when he silences the monsters crying ‘mine’ to her with his own grim uptake of the word, Tatiana recognizes this egotism. As in The Gipsies possessiveness and murder go hand in hand. Tatiana sees the destroyer in Onegin. The killing of Lensky in the dream foretells the duel. Was he an angel or a tempter, she had asked Onegin in her letter. In the dream he is truly demonic. In both the Elder’s judgement on Aleko and Tatiana’s rejection of Onegin, Dostoyevsky discovered a Russian ethos, and perhaps he was right. Certainly, Pushkin’s work, from The Gipsies and Onegin onwards, may be summed up as a debate with the West and a search for Russian values. The concept of the nation, first raised by the French Revolution, was being discussed throughout Europe at this time, and not least in Russia.
The earlier poem, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, has no relevance to the novel apart from its elegiac epigraph and a recollection of the fountain in Onegin’s Journey. The epigraph reads: ‘Many, like myself used to visit this fountain; but some are no more and the others are wandering in distant parts.’13Pushkin took the epigraph from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sadi via a French translation of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, where it is included. The second half of the epigraph recurs in the final stanza of Onegin, almost certainly applying, among others, to the fallen and exiled Decembrists, as the authorities were quick to suspect. Indeed, Vyazemsky was rapped over the knuckles by the authorities for quoting these lines in an article. The Fountain recounts a Romantic tale of a Polish princess captured and loved unrequitedly by a Crimean Khan and murdered by his hitherto favourite, Zarema. Putting her to death in turn, the Khan erects a ‘fountain of tears’ in memory of the Polish princess. Pushkin on his visit to the Crimea found the once gorgeous palace of Bakhchisaray deserted and the fountain rusted over. In Onegin’s Journey he imagines it still working.