A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature

Chapter Three: A Poet Astray: Pushkin and the Image of a Nomadic Wanderer

C H A P T e R T H R e e A Poet Astray Pushkin and the Image of a Nomadic wanderer Then for a long time I led a nomadic life, wandering first in the south, then in the North, and yet I never broke free from the borders of boundless Russia. —A. s. Pushkin, Puteshestvie v Arzrum what exile from himself can flee? —Lord Byron, Childe Harold The poet Alexander sergeevich Pushkin occupies a central role in the Russian literary-historical imagination: he is the emblematic Russian poet— the most Romantic of Russian Romantics—and has typically been viewed as the quintessential Russian, or even as an embodiment of Russian identity. As Levitt has noted, “Pushkin’s” semiotic value exceeds the influence of his literary work in the Russian cultural sphere.1 or, as Greenleaf and Moeller-sally claim, Pushkin’s role as “cultural forefather” has meant that the Russian public has been “‘imprinted’ with his image and cult.”2 strikingly, despite the large amount of scholarly work dedicated to Pushkin’s role as a cultural icon, little attention has been paid to a core aspect of Pushkin’s image: how wandering, and specifically the image of a nomadic wanderer, informs the articulation of Russian Romantic identity that Pushkin offered to his contemporaries and subsequent generations of readers.3 As with aspects of the work of Chaadaev, Goncharov, Herzen, and 82 A N A T I o N A s T R A Y Dostoevsky, the Russian identity that emerges in the idea of “Pushkin” is marked in a fundamental way by cultural nomadism—Russian identity is represented through Pushkin’s persona and several key characters as unfixed and as lying outside the borders of western european civilization and history. The figure of the nomadic wanderer became a convenient symbol for Russian self-definition because it reflected anxiety on the part of an educated Russian elite over Russia’s perceived alienation from europe and its seeming lack of a defined national path. As we saw in the Introduction, the notion of the national path, or linear progression toward a national-historical endpoint, acquired special importance in the context of Romanticism and especially in the German Romantic philosophy that forms the foundation of modern nationalism. This was especially the case in the work of Herder and Hegel, where nations were conceived of as traveling a specific path toward their fullest realization and contribution to history.4 Against this background, then, it is hardly surprising that in Russian Romantic literature, and in Pushkin’s work especially, the image of the Russian wanderer received such clear and memorable definition. Pushkin does not explicitly make use of the figure of the nomadic wanderer to represent the alienated state of the individual and the nation in his work, as Chaadaev does when he identifies Russians as nomads in his first Philosophical Letter. Rather, an image of a homeless and rootless Russian poet-wanderer emerges as a central element of Pushkin’s symbolic aura, both in the facts of his biography and in his poetic oeuvre. Through “Pushkin,” Russian identity comes to be embodied in the figure of a wandering exile. while this image typically articulated individual alienation from society and the natural world, in the Russian Romantic and post-Romantic imagination, Pushkin-as-nomadicwanderer came to represent the nation as a whole and its fateful alienation from a perceived european community. As noted earlier, Romantic emphasis on the expression of both national and individual character meant that these categories overlapped. National character might be envisioned in terms of individual symbolic imagery and the individual could be understood to be representative of the nation as a whole. This symmetry was amplified in the Russian case, where questions of national and individual identity emerged with particular force simultaneously. “Pushkin” the Russian aristocratic liberal poet of the early nineteenth century functions as the embodiment of the Russian Romantic individual. Moreover, he represents the Russian subject for whom the constraints of imperial Russian society rendered the assertion of individuality an inherently political, uncomfortable, and potentially rebellious act.5 The central concern of this chapter, then, is the importance of the trope of nomadic wandering in Pushkin’s historical image and in his work, specifically the early poems “To ovid” (“K ovidiiu,” 1821), “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” A Poet Astray 83 (“Kavkazskii plennik,” 1822), and “The Gypsies” (“Tsygany,” 1823–1824), and in his later...