Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations

Lighting the Green Lamp: Unpublished and Unknown Poems

84 Light­ ing the Green Lamp Un­ pub­ lished and Un­ known Poems Joe Pes­ chio­ Pushkin’s Pe­ ters­ burg pe­ riod (1817–20) is one of the most prob­ le­ matic pe­ ri­ ods of his lit­ er­ ary biog­ ra­ phy. The So­ viet Push­ kin in­ dus­ try and, be­ fore it, pre­ rev­ o­ lu­ tion­ ary pro­ gres­ sive Push­ kin­ ists, were ex­ ceed­ ingly anx­ ious to paint this junc­ ture in the na­ tional ­ poet’s biog­ ra­ phy as its de­ fin­ ing po­ lit­ i­ cal mo­ ment, one link­ ing him to the rev­ o­ lu­ tion­ ary move­ ments of his day. As a re­ sult, our ­ literary-historical pic­ ture of the Pe­ ters­ burg pe­ riod is some­ what ­ skewed. Push­ kin did of ­ course have close ties to many prom­ i­ nent fig­ ures of the se­ cret so­ ci­ eties dur­ ing this pe­ riod, and that fact is of no small im­ por­ tance. How­ ever, the ­ single-minded pur­ suit of that one sim­ ple, ­ golden piece of ev­ i­ dence that would ­ overtly and in­ con­ tro­ vert­ ibly tie Push­ kin to the rev­ o­ lu­ tion­ ary se­ cret so­ ci­ ety the Union of Wel­ fare (Soiuz blag­ o­ denst­ viia) has all too often ­ blinded schol­ ars to de­ tails that might en­ rich our pic­ ture of the Pe­ ters­ burg pe­ riod. Worse yet, this ideol­ o­ giz­ ing im­ per­ a­ tive has on oc­ ca­ sion even led schol­ ars to con­ ceal pri­ mary ma­ te­ ri­ als such as the ob­ scene bal­ lad The Shade of Bar­ kov (Ten’ Bar­ kova) from col­ leagues and the pub­ lic.1­ Pushkin’s in­ volve­ ment in the Green Lamp (Ze­ le­ naia lampa), a se­ cret lit­ er­ ary so­ ci­ ety ac­ tive in 1819–20, is a case in point. There seems to be Peschio / Lighting the Green Lamp 85 gen­ eral agree­ ment among the gen­ er­ a­ tions of Push­ kin­ ists who have stud­ ied the group that the Green Lamp is key to under­ stand­ ing ­ Pushkin ’s Pe­ ters­ burg pe­ riod. The pro­ gres­ sive Push­ kin­ ist Pavel Shcheg­ o­ lev, for ex­ am­ ple, wrote in 1908 that “it has even a car­ di­ nal sig­ nif­i­ cance. Any res­ o­ lu­ tion of the ques­ tion [of the Green Lamp] is the angle from which one must view ­ Pushkin’s works of 1818–20, the de­ vel­ op­ ment of his world­ view.”2 The “ques­ tion” Shcheg­ o­ lev re­ fers to is the ques­ tion of what, ex­ actly, the Green Lamp was. There have been var­ i­ ous an­ swers, and they trace the kind of arc that would bring a smile to the face of any post­ pro­ ces­ su­ al­ ist ar­ chae­ ol­ o­ gist.­ Nineteenth-century Push­ kin­ ists, par­ tic­ u­ larly Pavel An­ nen­ kov, con­ cluded on the basis of inter­ views and some very lim­ ited doc­ u­ men­ tary ev­ i­ dence that the Green Lamp was an “or­ gias­ tic” cir­ cle that, as Boris Mod­ za­ lev­ sky put it in 1899, “gath­ ered pri­ mar­ ily for mer­ ry­ mak­ ing but also had a lit­ er­ ary bent.”3 They, like the gen­ darmes who in­ ves­ ti­ gated the Green Lamp in 1821 and 1826, found no rea­ son to char­ ac­ ter­ ize it as a po­ lit­ i­ cal for­ ma­ tion. As more doc­ u­ ments came avail­ able, first from the Third Sec­ tion (se­ cret po­ lice) and later from the ­ archive of the Green Lamp it­ self, an­ other the­ sis ­ emerged, ac­ cord­ ing to which the Green Lamp was a ­ branch char­ ter of the Union of Wel­ fare and lit­ tle more than a prop­ a­ ganda arm of the early De­ cem­ brist move­ ment. For a va­ riety of rea­ sons, many of which re­ main un­ clear, this “anti-orgiastic” the­ sis­ gained cur­ rency over the ­ course of the twen­ ti­ eth cen­ tury and re­ mains­ firmly en­ trenched to this day in both schol­ arly lit­ er­ a­ ture and the pop­ u­ lar imag­ i­ na­ tion.4 It is re­ peated in pop­ u...