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Why Derzhavin?
- University of Wisconsin Press
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c:;jO Why Derzhavin? Perhaps the greatest mystery of Pushkin's life was, as I argued in the preceding section, his death, or at least the manner in which he set the terms of his potential demise. In a matter of months after penning the Stone Island cycle, a series of lyrics that in their internal progression put the poet's life and legacy in perspective with great valedictory power and restrained elegance, the man Pushkin was setting out for his fatal duel with d'Anthes-Heeckeren. It was, according to the historical clock, 4 P.M. on 27 January 1837 when he met Danzas, his second, at the sweetshop on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika, and the two proceeded together to the place ofthe duel. But earlier in the day, as Lotman reminded us, Pushkin had written the children's author A. O. Ishimova a letter soliciting translations for his journal The Contemporary and taking the occasion to praise her stories which he that very morning, "not intending to, fell to reading" (ponevole zachitalsia).l How are we to make sense of a personality that, on the one hand, appears to map its creative path onto the Orthodox Easter Week calendar in the magnificent cycle,2 and, on the other, writes a business letter in the shadow of death and, serenely undistracted ,3 takes active pleasure in another's artistic accomplishments ("That's how one should write!" [Vot kak nadobno pisat'!])? The cardinal principle of Pushkin's personality would seem to be then its resistance to definition from the 1. Pss, X:486. 2. See V. P. Stark, "Stikhotvorenie 'Ottsy pustynniki' i zheny neporochny .. .' i tsikl Pushkina 1836 g.," Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy 10 (1982): 193-202, and Sergei Davydov , "Pushkin's Eastern Triptych," in Puskin Today, ed. David M. Bethea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 38-58, for fine recent treatments of the internal structure of the Stone Island cycle and for arguments about a possible "paschal" sequencing of the lyrics. 3. There are, for example, no traces ofsprayed ink around the words formed by Pushkin in his letter to Ishimova, which is a sign of his calmness during composition. In other letters, where the occasion ofwriting made him angry or distraught, this ink spray often appeared as a telltale sign of the inner state. My thanks to Tatiana Krasnoborodko of the Manuscript Section of Pushkinskii Dom (St. Petersburg) for this information. 137 Copyrighted Material 138 PART II. Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the Life ofthe Poet outside: ready for death, it is not necessarily "courting" it (the "suicidal" argument ); putting its artistic house in order, it chooses, without being sure of the outcome, its moving day from history to History. Thinking about Pushkin, we as readers can never come to rest, a fact both exhausting and intoxicating. As soon as we fix the man going to the duel as someone calm and making future plans, we remember earlier lines of verse such as "And so it seems, my turn has come, / My dear Delvig is calling me" or "No, all of me won't die." 4 Yet as soon as we give a "fatalistic" shape to those lines, which in human terms could only mean that the man provoked his own death, we must remember his last written words to Ishimova. In the first part of this study I tried to situate Pushkin in contemporary critical discourse by suggesting that it was the elusively oscillating "standin -relation-to" that often gets left out of scholarlyj"scientific" approaches to his life and work, whether they be psychoanalytic (psychology as biology), structural-linguistic, or semiotic. By the same token, a more aggressively rhetorical (or "postmodern") approach, such as that of Harold Bloom, that foregrounds verbal confrontations with poetic authority figures at the near total expense of existential ones also does not adequately seem to account for the sensation ofrisk, ofpsychic cost, everywhere present in Pushkin's life and writing . Only by focusing on the powerful coincidence/coincidence of freedom within limitation, both in the poet's life and in his art and in their interaction, can we begin to pin down, if only momentarily, this Russian Proteus. The essential Pushkin, in this reading, is never pure structure and never pure feeling , but always their fruitful and larger-than-life embrace. Also, while mention was made in the first part of those male authority figures, beginning with Voltaire, with whom the poet did battle in order to make a...