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Chapter Seven: The Codes of Speaking and Seeing
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Chapter Seven The Codes of Speaking and Seeing Слово, что воробей, вылетит, не поймаешь. A word is like a sparrow: if it flies off, you can’t catch it. —Russian proverb IN THE DRAFT OF his letter to Raevsky of July 1825 Pushkin writes: “You will ask: is your tragedy a tragedy of character or of custom? I have chosen the easier genre, but I have tried to combine them both” (Wolff, 1999, p. 156; my translation from the French). Pushkin was replying to a letter from Raevsky, in which the latter had stressed the need for intensive research before undertaking a project like Godunov, and had expressed his doubts about whether Pushkin had the necessary patience. Although, as Pushkin stresses here, he had leaned toward the “character” aspect, the vignettes of Muscovite life that he draws are the result of careful study. Pushkin maintained that he attached great importance to the reconstruction in the text of the cultural codes of the period and “tried to glean from the chronicles both the mental outlook and language of those days” (Wolff, 1999, p. 249). However, we should remember that in the play we have to do not with actual Muscovite codes, but with Pushkin’s perception of those codes (or rather, our understanding of his perception of the codes). That is to say, in what follows I shall attempt to reconstruct Pushkin ’s model of Muscovite society, especially insofar as it is a model of power relationships. At best this is not history, and we should not look to Pushkin to tell us what Muscovy was really like. At the same time, his model of that society is of great interest, since it expresses his own political philosophy and reading of Russian history. Our analysis is therefore likely to tell us as much about Pushkin, and his ideological interpretation of history, as it will about the nature of the sixteenth-century Muscovite state as such. Pushkin structures the power relationships in Muscovite society around certain codes. In this chapter I examine two such codes that play a fundamental role in the play and express the poet’s vision of Muscovite society at the end of the sixteenth century. The codes in question are, first, the code of speaking, silence, and listening, and, second, the code of seeing and blindness —in other words, the codes associated with the spoken word, on the 141 one hand, and the visual image on the other. A careful study of the lexicon of the text reveals that these codes form subsystems that occupy a special place in the overall semantic structure. In 1829 Pushkin wrote in the draft of the foreword to Boris Godunov (written in the form of another letter to Raevsky): “Following Shakespeare’s example I have limited myself to developing an age and historical characters without seeking theatrical effects, romantic pathos, etc.” (Wolff, 199, p. 245; my translation from the French). Pushkin is evoking an epoch and culture—that of pre-Petrine, Orthodox Rus. Since these two physical activities in question were of great symbolic importance and since the interchangeability of word and image formed a fundamental cultural opposition, as exemplified in the Russian icon, in which image and text coexist and the image can be recoded as text and vice versa, it seems natural that these two codes should occupy such a special place in the text. I therefore argue that they are not chosen by chance. Is Pushkin totally impervious to these codes and the social model they constitute? In other words, is he outside the system, or is his text another expression of the codes and the axiological principles that they imply? We should remember that Pushkin lived and wrote in post-Petrine Russia, in which cultural codes had undergone a fundamental transformation (which is one reason why Boris Godunov, of all his works, is of special interest, since it foregrounds the differences between pre- and post-Petrine Russia). Nevertheless, Lotman and Uspensky, for example, in their analysis of the dualistic nature of Russian culture up to the end of the eighteenth century, insist on the persistence of the underlying features of the culture despite any apparent drastic changes: “Analysis shows convincingly that new historical structures in Russian culture of this period invariably include mechanisms that regenerate the culture of the past. The more dynamic a culture is, the more active are the memory mechanisms which ensure the homeostatic character of the whole.”1 The question we have to consider might then be phrased as follows...