X
…
Душа стесняется лирическим волненьем,
Трепещет и звучит, и ищет, как во сне,
Излиться наконец свободным проявленьем —
…
XI
И мысли в голове волнуются в отваге,
И рифмы легкие навстречу им бегут,
И пальцы просятся к перу, перо к бумаге,
Минута – и стихи свободно потекут.
…
XII
…Куда ж нам плыть?…….
……………………………
……………………………
(III, 321; my emphasis)
X
The soul is overwhelmed by lyrical agitation,
It trembles and sounds aloud, and seeks, as in a dream,
To pour itself out at last in a free display —
…
XI
And thoughts in one’s head surge in brave agitation,
And light rhymes go out to meet them,
And one’s fingers ask for the pen, the pen for paper,
Wait a minute and verses begin to flow freely.
…
XII
.. Where shall we sail?…….
……………………………..
……………………………..
Once again Pushkin aligns the lyrical urge, the need to express the harmony accumulating within, with something physical, concrete – the fingers reaching out for the pen and the pen seeking the paper.
The second thing we immediately notice, which is tied to the unconstrained quality of his intonation, is the young Pushkin s astonishing genre dexterity, where each genre equals a distinct voice, style, lexicon, poetic structure. This facility with different ways of saying things poetically could be an aspect of the legacy of parlor games and wordplay that the boy absorbed in the presence of his parents (Sergei L’vovich was known in the literary salons of St. Petersburg as a kind of verbal quick-change artist) and their friends. In any event, for his classes and on his own Pushkin tried his hand at all the different types of poem practiced at the time. Madrigal, noël, elegy, friendly epistle, epitaph, Anacreontica, ode, romance, hussar drinking song, epic, love lyric – he fit into each of these effortlessly. It was as though he were trying on a new costume with each one and took delight in cavorting before the mirror.10 His ability to mimic, to ventriloquize the voice zone of the genre, was what separated him from the others.11 In other words, he had the poetic equivalent of perfect pitch. An illustration shows the difference between Pushkin and his mates in this respect. Illichevskii loved to create anagrams, or in his terms, “charade logogriphs,” that acted out a word in the form of a riddle. These puzzles were then included in The Lyceum Sage (Litseiskii mudrets), one of the school’s several journals, which everyone read and in which Pushkin took active part. In one such anagram Illichevskii describes three items without naming them which when combined would decorate a gravesite – something bundled together (kipa = “stack”), a legendary, though faint-hearted warrior (Paris), and a type of food (ris = “rice”). The answer yields kiparis, or “cypress tree.”12 Illichevskii’s riddle is self-contained (there is nothing extraneous to it) and shows beautifully how these bright young students came at language.
But in Pushkin’s wordplay there was invariably a kind of challenge. In 1816 he came up with his own charade entitled “Comparison” (Sravnenie):
He хочешь ли узнать, моя драгая,
Какая разница меж Буало и мной?
У Депрео была лишь, [запятая]
А у меня: с, [две точки с запятой]13
The solution to this riddle is more racy, more “Pushkinian,” than Illichevskii’s cypress tree. Here Pushkin is referring to an episode from Boileau’s childhood that he would have immediately picked up on.14 Helvetius tells the story that once when very young Boileau fell down, which movement raised his smock and exposed him. At that moment a turkey pecked him several times in the groin, leaving him without his “two periods” and intensely fearful of women his entire life. Thus what the sixteen-year-old Pushkin is telling his listener, “my sweetheart,” is that he is endowed with all the necessary punctuation marks (both the “comma” and the “periods”) to be a good lover. And yet the words for “comma” and “period” are not spelled out; they are simply left as marks on the line. The reader must see them and sound them out to make the rhymes. The riddle is witty, salacious, and a kind of challenge all at the same time.
Another more elaborate example is the “philosophical ode” entitled “Moustaches” (Usy) of 1816.15 In this humorous send-up of the ultra-serious odic genre Pushkin tries on two voices, one the older Derzhavin’s, the other the hussar officer and war hero Denis Davydov’s. Davydov was renowned for his flamboyantly bushy moustaches, which he was forever twirling. The moustache was the most salient attribute of the hussar; it was as though all the hussar’s legendary daring (udaV) was located in this hirsute outgrowth, as the biblical Samson’s strength was reputed to be in his hair. The poem opens with the voice of Derzhavin warning Davydov, in the phrasing of Derzhavin’s most famous valedictory lines, that the river of time (reka vremen) sweeps everything away in its path. Then, for the next several stanzas, the voice zone of Davydov, though still the addressee, takes over. Now we see the moustache through the eyes of its owner and his personal mythology: it is so long it wraps around his ear; it is sprinkled with rum and wine; glistening with kohl (hair crème), it has never known the razor; in the heat of battle, it helps its owner keep a cool head, as he grabs a saber in one hand and his hairy talisman in the other; and then, when more peaceful times have come, it accompanies the hussar in his conquests of the fair sex, as again one hand caresses the breast of a beauty and the other twirls the moustache. This is all very funny and very much in the spirit of hussar bravado. In the last stanza, however, as expected, there is a turn back to the viewpoint of Derzhavin, who reminds the dashing warrior and lover that his ruddy cheeks will fade, his black curls will turn grey, and – the punch line – old age will pluck out his moustaches. The point here is this is neither Derzhavin nor Davydov talking, although the recording of their voices is virtually perfect. It is Pushkin, the fledgling, who either has no moustache or only the beginning of one. He uses both voices against each other in order to assert his own, which plays behind the scenes and is present in the humor and, equally important, the implicit challenge. I see youth and age, says this voice; I am the confidence that doesn’t take sides and can make a joke out of their claims to ultimate authority.
There is one genre at which Pushkin failed miserably during these