Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations

Politics and Poetry: The “Anti-Polish” Poems and “I built myself a monument not made by human hands”

283 Pol­ i­ tics and ­ Poetry The “Anti-Polish” Poems and “I built my­ self a mon­ u­ ment not made by human hands” Katya Ho­ kan­ son Ye who dwell Where Kos­ ciusko dwelt, re­ mem­ ber­ ing yet The un­ paid ­ amount of ­ Catherine’s ­ bloody debt! Po­ land! o’er which the aveng­ ing angel ­ pass’d, But left thee as he found thee, still a waste, For­ get­ ting all thy still en­ dur­ ing claim, Thy lot­ ted peo­ ple and ­ extinguish’d name, Thy sigh for free­ dom, thy ­ long-flowing tear, That sound that ­ crashes in the ­ tyrant’s ear— Kos­ ciusko! On—on—on—the ­ thirst of war Gasps for the gore of serfs and of their czar. The half bar­ baric ­ Moscow’s min­ a­ rets Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets. Byron, “The Age of ­ Bronze” (1823) Al­ though ­ surely The Shade of Bar­ kov (Ten’ Bar­ kova) takes the prize among poems that many read­ ers wish Push­ kin had not writ­ ten, there are other works that tend to be ­ passed over in si­ lence ­ rather than de­ nied or ­ placed under overt taboo. ­ Pushkin’s ­ so-called ­ anti-Polish poems, “Be­ fore the Sa­ cred Tomb” (“Pered grob­ nit­ seiu svi­ a­ toi”), “To the Slan­ der­ ers of 284 Taboo Writings Rus­ sia” (“Kle­ vet­ ni­ kam Ros­ sii”), and “An­ ni­ ver­ sary of Bor­ o­ dino” (“Bor­ o­ dins­ kaia go­ dovsh­ china”), often ­ treated as a tril­ ogy, have been la­ beled as an un­ for­ tu­ nate re­ sult of ­ Pushkin’s at­ tempt to curry favor with the tsar or ­ merely dis­ missed as in­ fe­ rior and ­ poorly writ­ ten, al­ though he him­ self was proud of these poems through­ out his life.1 Fur­ ther­ more, the lack of schol­ arly at­ ten­ tion, es­ pe­ cially to “To the Slan­ der­ ers of Rus­ sia” and “An­ ni­ ver­ sary of Bor­ o­ dino,” has pre­ vented a fully in­ formed read­ ing of a much more can­ on­ ized and ad­ mired work, “I built my­ self a mon­ u­ ment not made by human hands” (“Ia pam­ i­ at­ nik sebe vozd­ vig ner­ u­ ko­ t­ vor­ nyi”). This chap­ ter ­ places the two main 1831 “anti-Polish” poems into their ­ proper his­ tor­ i­ cal and po­ lit­ i­ cal con­ text and dem­ on­ strates what this added con­ text can bring to a dis­ cus­ sion of ­ Pushkin’s fa­ mous mon­ u­ ment poem. When “To the Slan­ der­ ers of Rus­ sia” and “An­ ni­ ver­ sary of Bor­ o­ dino” are men­ tioned at all, they are usu­ ally not ­ treated as aes­ thetic works; Hans Rothe ­ points out that until 2006, there had been no pub­ lished inter­ pre­ ta­ tion of “To the Slan­ der­ ers of Rus­ sia” for ­ seventy years.2 The poem was com­ mented on in jour­ na­ lis­ tic terms dur­ ing this time pe­ riod but not ­ treated as a work of ­ poetry, as it had been prior to that pe­ riod, es­ pe­ cially in the third quar­ ter of the nine­ teenth cen­ tury. Rothe sug­ gests that West­ ern read­ ers have seen the poem as pri­ mar­ ily po­ lit­ i­ cal; un­ like the pol­ i­ tics they wel­ comed, ex­ cused, or ne­ glected to see in other works by Push­ kin, they ­ deemed that the pol­ i­ tics of “To the Slan­ der­ ers of Rus­ sia” made it un­ worthy of de­ tailed in­ ves­ ti­ ga­ tion. Even when con­ ced­ ing, for ex­ am­ ple, that “tech­ ni­ cally it is one of ­ Pushkin’s ma­ tur­ est per­ for­ mances ,” John Bay­ ley says that it “pays the pen­ alty of good jour­ nal­ ism” and calls it an “in­ stinc­ tive out­ burst.”3 He does not even men­ tion “An­ ni­ ver­ sary of Bor­ o­ dino.” Rothe ­ writes of a di­ ver­ gence in the re­ cep­ tion of “To the Slan­ der­ ers of Rus­ sia”: ad­ mired by mon­ ar­ chists and ideol­ o­ gists of the state, it is often de­ spised and ig­ nored by lib­ er­ als and demo­ crats. The his­ tory of its re­ cep­ tion, he notes, has not yet been writ­ ten.4...