Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations

The Poetics of Dry Transgression in Pushkin’s Necro-Erotic Verse

239 The Poet­ ics of Dry Trans­ gres­ sion in ­ Pushkin’s­ Necro-Erotic Verse Jon­ a­ than ­ Brooks Platt Among ­ Pushkin’s last love lyr­ ics are two poems ad­ dressed to dead be­ lov­ eds—“In­ can­ ta­ tion” (“Zak­ lin­ a­ nie” [1830]) and “For the ­ shores of your dis­ tant home­ land” (“Dlia bere­ gov otch­ izny ­ dal’noi” [1830]). Both poems im­ a­ gine, in­ deed de­ mand, an ­ erotic re­ un­ ion with the dead woman in ques­ tion, and both re­ call a par­ tic­ u­ lar mo­ ment of fas­ ci­ na­ tion with the ­ beloved’s death agony. “In­ can­ ta­ tion” sum­ mons the be­ loved back in any form, but ­ ideally as she was on her last day, pale as win­ ter and ­ marred by her death ­ throes. “For the ­ shores of your dis­ tant home­ land” waits for a prom­ ised kiss of re­ un­ ion, even ­ though it has ­ turned to dust along with both the ­ beloved’s “beauty” and her “tor­ ments”— al­ low­ ing no dis­ tinc­ tion ­ between these mu­ tu­ ally in­ ex­ tri­ cable ele­ ments of her ap­ peal.1 Yet de­ spite these ­ poems’ ev­ i­ dent ­ necro-eroticism, it is im­ pos­ sible to call them taboo in the re­ cep­ tion of Push­ kin. Un­ like the bawdy Ga­ brie­ liad (Gav­ rii­ li­ ada [1821]) or The Shade of Bar­ kov (Ten’ Bar­ kova [1814 or 1815]), the dan­ gers of pol­ lu­ tion in ­ Pushkin’s (in fact quite nu­ mer­ ous) ­ necro-erotic works have gen­ er­ ally ­ proved easy to neu­ tral­ ize.2 These two lyr­ ics are usu­ ally read on a pop­ u­ lar level as ex­ press­ ing the 240 Taboo Writings op­ ti­ mis­ tic, mo­ rally ad­ mir­ able idea that love con­ quers all, and more so­ phis­ ti­ cated read­ ings typ­ i­ cally offer only sub­ tle vari­ a­ tions on this theme.3 Oleg Zy­ ri­ a­ nov of Ural State Uni­ ver­ sity, for ex­ am­ ple, calls the de­ mand for the prom­ ised kiss in “For the ­ shores of your dis­ tant home­ land” “uto­ pian” and ­ argues that “In­ can­ ta­ tion” is not­ able for its “con­ scious era­ sure” of the “mo­ tifs of vam­ pir­ ism and nec­ ro­ philia” found in sim­ i­ lar works by ­ Pushkin’s Eu­ ro­ pean and ­ American con­ tem­ po­ rar­ ies. The Rus­ sian ­ poem’s ­ speaker sum­ mons his dead lover “not in order to learn the se­ crets of the grave, let alone to wal­ low in a per­ verted vo­ lup­ tu­ ous­ ness in the ­ spirit of deca­ dence, but to res­ ur­ rect (in the full sense of the word) the be­ loved shade, in some sense an­ tic­ i­ pat­ ing Nikolai­ Fedorov’s na­ tional var­ i­ ant of the phi­ lo­ so­ phy of uni­ ver­ sal res­ ur­ rec­ tion.”4­ Zyrianov’s fail­ ure to find an ele­ ment of trans­ gres­ sion in ­ Push­ kin’s poems is not sim­ ply a re­ sult of blind de­ nial. These ­ poems’ trans­ gres­ sive qual­ ity is in­ deed dif­ fer­ ent from the more ­ plainly ma­ ca­ bre ­ erotic tra­ di­ tion that runs from ba­ roque the­ a­ ter to the ­ gothic novel, ­ through Byron and Poe to Baude­ laire and deca­ dence. Trans­ gres­ sion in “In­ can­ ta­ tion” and “For the ­ shores of your dis­ tant home­ land” comes with­ out the shud­ der of hor­ ror, dis­ gust, or de­ vi­ ant bliss typ­ i­ cal for this lit­ er­ ary cur­ rent. In other words, it is a trans­ gres­ sion that does not rec­ og­ nize it­ self as such. It is what I will call a dry trans­ gres­ sion. To under­ stand what this means re­ quires an under­ stand­ ing of the di­ alec­ ti­ cal logic at the heart of what Phi­ lippe Ariès re­ ferred to as “the age of the beau­ ti­ ful death” in Eu­ ro­ pean cul­ ture.5 Ac­ cord­ ing to the ­ French his­ to­ rian, the eigh­ teenth cen­ tury wit­ nessed a dra­ matic ­ change in dom­ i­ nant Eu­ ro­ pean views of death and dying. A new sense of hy­ giene (i.e., a shift in...