Pushkin’s “To Ovid” and Virgil’s Georgics

The critical ambition to use reception as a means by which to gain new insight cannot invariably be fulfilled, yet it is ever the exceptional cases that prove the matter. I wish to examine what appears to be an extraordinarily pointed allusion to Virgil’s Georgics in the final lines of Pushkin’s “To Ovid” (1821; published 1823). Allusion to the Georgics is a rare event in Pushkin’s work, and critics are generally agreed that Virgil never served Pushkin as a model in the substantial ways that Ovid and Horace sometimes did.¹ I shall consider the empirical evidence that might support or weaken the plausibility of the Virgilian allusion in question. But my concern is mainly to discuss whether the perceived allusion renders the Latin and the Russian passages mutually illuminating—whether it can help us to discern distinctive aspects of Virgil’s poem as well as Pushkin’s that might otherwise have escaped appreciation.

Allusions are not objective facts but cognitive events.² To the present reader, at any rate, Pushkin’s final lines allude to the conclusion of Virgil’s Georgics (c. 36–29 B.C.), where the Roman poet contrastively relates his own career to the imperial role of Octavian, the future Augustus:

Здесь, лирой северной пустыни оглашая, Скитался я в те дни, как на брега Дуная Великодушный грек свободу вызывал, И ни единый друг мне в мире не внимал; Но чуждые холмы, поля и рощи сонны, И музы мирные мне были благосклонны.³

Here, sounding the lyre of the northern wilderness, I wandered in those days, when on the banks of the Danube The magnanimous Greek called people to freedom. Not a single friend in the world listened to me But these alien hills, fields, and sleepy groves And the peaceful muses wished me well.⁴

Virgil’s final lines are identified as programmatic by their position at the poem’s end. Here, for the first and only time in his oeuvre, the poet refers to himself by name: illo Vergilium. He refers to himself as the poet “who toyed with shepherds’ songs” and sets his poetic “seal” or sphragis on the Georgics by making its final line repeat the first line of the Eclogues. Thus identifying himself as the author of the Eclogues, Virgil introduces the notion of a poetic career to serve as a prospective as well as retrospective framework for the Georgics. He juxtaposes his own career with Caesar’s:

Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum fulminat Euphraten bello victorque volentis per populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo. illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi.

(IV.559–66)⁵

So much I sang in addition to the care of fields, of cattle, and of trees, while great Caesar thundered in war by deep Euphrates and bestowed a victor’s laws on willing nations, and essayed the path to Heaven. In those days I, Virgil, was nursed by sweet Parthenope [Naples], and rejoiced in the arts of inglorious ease—I who toyed with shepherds’ songs, and, in youth’s boldness, sang of you, Tityrus, under the canopy of a spreading beech.

(Loeb, rev. Goold)

In my reading, then, Pushkin’s final lines strikingly allude to Virgil’s closing passage. In fact, Pushkin appears to be imitating Virgil in much the way that Latin poets often strove to imitate their own models, i.e., confrontationally and competitively, in a spirit of emulation. While Pushkin’s rhetoric closely imitates Virgil, the modern scene he presents by this analogy highlights the telling contrasts between his own situation and the Roman poet’s.

The elements of sameness in trope and situation, then, act as a mordant to capture the elements of difference. Whereas Virgil flourished under the aegis of Augustus, Pushkin finds himself effectively exiled by Tsar Alexander. Whereas Virgil may appear compromised by his otium (freedom, leisure) under imperial patronage, Pushkin celebrates his own independence in the face of imperial censorship and the threat of persecution. Whereas the well-connected northerner Virgil sings of the Italian countryside from his home in the culturally still very Greek city of Naples,⁶ the ostracized Russian solitary in his Bessarabian rustication sings “northern” songs—poetry that...