Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations

The Blasphemies of The Gabrieliad

261 The Blas­ phe­ mies of The Ga­ brie­ liad An­ drew Kahn­ Pushkin’s The Ga­ brie­ liad (Gav­ rii­ li­ ada [1821]) vi­ o­ lates ta­ boos of a so­ cial, re­ li­ gious, and po­ lit­ i­ cal kind, and these inter­ re­ lated trans­ gres­ sions­ against the au­ thor­ ities of ­ church and state made an os­ ten­ sibly witty poem into a dan­ ger­ ous piece. The work­ ing def­i­ ni­ tion of taboo that I draw on is that it is “a pro­ scrip­ tion of be­ ha­ vi­ our for a spec­ ifi­ able com­ mu­ nity of peo­ ple, for a spec­ ified con­ text, at a given place and time.”1 In the first in­ stance, the ­ poem’s treat­ ment of vir­ gin­ ity, while fall­ ing far short of the ­ French tra­ di­ tion of lib­ er­ tine por­ nog­ ra­ phy that Push­ kin and his con­ tem­ po­ rar­ ies en­ joyed, under­ mined con­ tem­ po­ rary Rus­ sian at­ ti­ tudes about sex­ ual li­ cense and fe­ male con­ duct. Sec­ ondly, the anti­ bib­ li­ cal nar­ ra­ tive ar­ tic­ u­ lated by Satan, the first of ­ Mary’s three se­ duc­ ers in­ clud­ ing the arch­ an­ gel Ga­ briel and God, rep­ re­ sented a sac­ ri­ leg­ ious at­ tack on the sym­ bolic pur­ ity of the Vir­ gin and for that rea­ son of­ fended ­ against­ church dogma. Fi­ nally, the very ex­ is­ tence and cir­ cu­ la­ tion of the poem ex­ ploited the rel­ a­ tive lib­ er­ al­ ness of legal stat­ utes gov­ ern­ ing ­ speech, tak­ ing ad­ van­ tage of the gap ­ between the law and state con­ trol to send out a sub­ ver­ sive mes­ sage cham­ pion­ ing ra­ tion­ al­ ism ­ against re­ li­ gious ob­ scu­ rant­ ism, laugh­ ter ­ against se­ ri­ ous­ ness, and ­ poetic free­ dom ­ against cen­ sor­ ship. In­ flu­ enced by free ­ speech theo­ rists like Ju­ dith But­ ler and 262 Taboo Writings the so­ cial anthro­ pol­ o­ gist Mary Doug­ las, I argue that The Ga­ brie­ liad looks sub­ ver­ sive, ­ rather than ­ merely rude, when we read its sac­ ri­ leg­ ious nar­ ra­ tive sym­ bol­ i­ cally as per­ for­ ma­ tive ­ speech that chal­ lenges the lim­ its of so­ cial tol­ er­ ance and state cen­ sor­ ship. Vi­ o­ lat­ ing Re­ spect­ abil­ ity Let us ­ briefly re­ view the cen­ tral and most sub­ ver­ sive epi­ sode of the nar­ ra­ tive on which this ar­ gu­ ment de­ pends. The young Mary lives in an os­ ten­ sibly sex­ less mar­ riage with Jo­ seph, who is ­ mocked for his in­ er­ tia and even­ tu­ ally rid­ i­ culed as a cuck­ old. En­ ticed by her youth­ ful ­ beauty, God ­ alerts the arch­ an­ gel Ga­ briel, who is sent to re­ con­ noi­ ter on his be­ half. An angel in ­ heaven, he ­ serves, as the nar­ ra­ tor notes (l. 147), as a pimp on earth. But Satan is on the qui vive and beats Ga­ briel to the first inter­ view with Mary. He ap­ plies his el­ o­ quence to a re­ vi­ sion­ ist ac­ count of Eve and the Gar­ den of Eden, ex­ pos­ ing orig­ i­ nal sin as no more than a­ self-serving ruse on the part of God and jus­ tify­ ing Eve’s li­ cense and fe­ male sex­ u­ al­ ity as in­ no­ cent pas­ times. Such per­ sua­ sion ­ arouses ­ Mary’s aware­ ness of her own body and the phys­ i­ cal work­ ings of de­ sire and leads her to yield her vir­ gin­ ity to Satan. The ex­ pe­ ri­ ence ­ proves so en­ joy­ able that the next day she finds it hard to re­ sist the bland­ ish­ ments of Ga­ briel, who ­ betrays his em­ ployer by se­ duc­ ing Mary. By this stage, Mary her­ self has be­ come ­ highly sexed. As she ­ dreams of fur­ ther pleas­ ure, God ap­ pears to her in the form of a dove—in Chris­ tian ic­ o­ nog­ ra­ phy a stan­ dard sym­ bol of the Holy ­ Spirit—which vi­ o­ lates and in­ semi­ nates her. The birth...