The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire

4. Pushkin, Lermontov, and the Elegiac Sublime

4 Pushkin, Lermontov, and the Elegiac Sublime Pushkin and Prophecy A challenge to any scholar, Pushkin is doubly so for any consideration of the imperial sublime.Along with a number of works born of the poet’s two journeys to the south, Pushkin’s Kavkazskii plennik (Prisoner of the Caucasus), written in 1820–21 and published in 1822, is rightly credited with consolidating the Caucasian theme in Russian literature. No other poet, save Pushkin’s anointed successor, Lermontov, is so closely identified with Russia’s southern borderlands, and hence with a major aspect of this book. At the same time Pushkin is the first poet of concern to us to have broken definitively with the inherited tradition of the odic sublime . A writer naturally prone to exceed and evolve beyond any aesthetic paradigm, Pushkin viewed the prescriptive taxonomies of eighteenth -century poetics, as well as the looser sensibility of Byronic romanticism, as literary modes to be mastered and eventually shed. This chapter addresses the fundamental recasting of the imperial sublime effected first by Pushkin and then by Lermontov. The Caucasian theme is one of the most studied aspects of Russian romantic literature in terms of its stylistic and formal properties, and more recently in terms of its cultural politics. Yet the remarkable innovation that Pushkin’s southern works represent might still benefit from being placed in a creative tension with the poetic tradition delineated in the previous chapters. In Lidiia Ginzburg’s decisive formulation, “Pushkin rejected the romantic [i.e., Decembrist—H.R.] sublime [vysokosti] (and the classicist one as well). Failing to understand the historical signifi160 cance of this rejection, the Russian romantics of the 1820s and 1830s attributed it to Pushkin’s adherence to the Karamzinian school.”1 How, then, did Pushkin shatter the odic sublime? For what reasons did he do so?And what, if any, alternatives did he propose? In the following pages I first explore Pushkin’s dialogue with the Decembrist poet Küchelbecker and, through him, with the odic past. I turn then to several works by Pushkin and Lermontov, in which the rhetorical sublime of the “lofty style” is largely abandoned in favor of an aesthetic form of the sublime, based on a dialectic between the subjectivity of the elegiac or Byronic hero and the Caucasian landscape and its people. Pushkin’sattitudetotheode,andtoallpoeticgenres,wasneverasonedimensional as Küchelbecker’s. Even as he experimented with the intimate genres championed by Karamzin, Batiushkov, and Zhukovskii, the youthful Pushkin also wrote political verse. “Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele”(MemoriesinTsarskoeSelo)(1814),theearliestpoempublishedunder the poet’s name, was at least partly in the odic style, whereas Pushkin wrote several poems in the same period that might be termed protoDecembrist , of which the poem “Vol’nost’” (Liberty) (1817) was conspicuously subtitled “An Ode.”2 “Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele” deals chiefly with Russia’s victory over Napoleon, while “Vol’nost’” attacks royalabsolutismfromapoliticallymoderateperspectivethatseekstoreconcile monarchy with the rule of law. The panegyric-ceremonial aspect of Pushkin’s first poem and the rhetorical indignation of “Vol’nost’” together cover the full ideological range of the Russian ode from Lomonosov to Radishchev. Yet both poems are equally interesting for the presence of stylistic and thematic elements that break with odic norms. “Vospominaniia v Tsarskom Sele,” read before an audience that included the aging Derzhavin, deepens Lomonosov’s contrast between war and peace(tishina)intoamoremelancholyapprehensionofhistoricalchange. In placeofthecumulativelistofvictoriesthathadformerlyservedtospatialize territory, the poem opens with a lingering description of Tsarskoe Selo, the country retreat of Catherine the Great, which functions in the poem as a distinct if complementary site of historical memory: Here each step gives birth in the soul To recollections of past years; Looking about oneself, A Russian proclaims with a sigh: “Everything has disappeared, the great [Catherine] is no more!” And, falling into deep thought, leaning over the grassy shores He sits in silence, lending his ears to the wind. (1:84) Pushkin, Lermontov, and the Elegiac Sublime 161 Contemplating the eighteenth century as it has been commemorated in the monuments scattered about the gardens of Tsarskoe Selo, the poet is reminded of the recent Napoleonic wars, whose victorious conclusion he hails as a sign of the historical continuum linking Catherine’s reign to the new century. The reader is nevertheless struck by the stylistic detour required to achieve this thematic continuity. Instead of simply writing a patriotic ode celebrating Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Pushkin feels compelled to frame that victory in a remembrance...