Subject
Pushkin/NYTimes (fwd)
Date
Body
June 5, 1999
THINK TANK
For Everyone, Non-Russians, Too, There's a
Personal Pushkin
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
MOSCOW -- To Russians, Aleksandr Pushkin is the
heart and soul of their literature. "Pushkin is our everything," said a
fellow Russian poet.
Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of Pushkin's birth, and
not only are Russians in the grip of Pushkinmania, but they also insist
they are the only ones who could be.
Those who know him best in Russia say that is because he is
quite simply untranslatable. Valentin Nepomnyaschy, a leading Pushkin
scholar, wrote recently: "Of the world's geniuses, he is least translated into
other languages and the hardest to grasp in translation: in cultures with other
languages, he seizes the soul only of those who know and love our language,
our culture, those to whom Russia is not spiritually alien."
Perhaps. But Pushkin's quintessential Russianness hasn't
prevented others from laying claim to him as well.
The British actor Ralph Fiennes, who stars in a new movie
version of "Yevgeny Onegin," which had its premiere in St. Petersburg and
Moscow this week, does not know Russian. Still, Fiennes, who is appearing
in a salute to Pushkin at Carnegie Hall next Saturday night, said he was
immediately struck by Pushkin's work when he first read "Onegin" while he was a drama school
student.
Fiennes told the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda: "I am
English and I have heard of such a phenomenon as the mysterious Russian
soul, but apparently we foreigners must spend an entire lifetime in order
to understand what this is. On the other hand, being English, I ask
myself, what is the English soul? We took into account that our film is
for an international audience and strove to make it understandable to
absolutely everyone."
The $14 million film is directed by Fiennes's sister Marta and
also stars Liv Tyler
as the innocent Tatyana Larina, who is rejected by the
aristocratic Onegin only to
reject him years later, after she has married and moved up the
social ladder.
Komsomolskaya Pravda notes with amusement that at least two of
the melodies
used in the movie, which is set in the early 19th century, are
quite jarring for a
Russian audience: a waltz from the time of the Russo-Japanese
war in 1905
and a Stalin-era song.
Another non-Russian who has tackled Pushkin is Kama Ginkas,
a Lithuanian who is one of the most respected theater directors in Moscow.
In his play, "Pushkin. Duel. Death.," a gathering of Pushkin's friends,
acquaintances and hangers-on grasp in vain at explanations for the duel
that led to his death as they sit around a table with the poet's death
mask as centerpiece.
At the end of the play, the table rises up to the ceiling
and, struggling to cling to it, they fall off one by one.
"Pushkin slips away, he dissolves into the air, because he
himself is like air," Ginkas told Literaturnaya Gazeta, referring to the
difficulty of capturing Pushkin both in another language or another form.
"Maybe this is precisely the uniqueness of Pushkin himself, and of this
poetry. He is formless, immaterial."
Meanwhile, at a Pushkin-Goethe Festival held recently in
Moscow to observe the poets' birthdays (this year is Goethe's 250th),
Dmitri Prigov, a post-modernist poet and conceptual artist, took the first
line from "Onegin" (" 'My uncle -- high ideals inspire him' ") and set it
to Buddhist and Muslim mantras and Russian Orthodox and Gregorian chants.
The festival ended in a "Walpurgian Night," a Night of the
Witches celebration featuring hard-core German pornography, a disco and
verses by Pushkin and Goethe set to rap and hip-hop.
Actually, the notion of a multicultural and multifacted
Pushkin is not entirely new. Regarded as the founder of the modern
Russian language, Pushkin also spoke French, as was common among
aristocrats of his time. His great-grandfather was from Africa, a source
of exotic fascination both to himself and to his readers.
His identity was constantly remolded to fit the needs of
various groups. Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg to the south in
1820 for writing political poems while participating in a discussion group
that later developed into the Decembrist movement that sought to overthrow
Nicholas I in 1825. Although he had friends among the Decembrists, he did
not participate in their plot and in the end remained a monarchist, which
is what the czarist regime chose to emphasize during his anniversary in
1899.
That didn't stop Soviet rulers from portraying him as a
revolutionary, interpreting a line from one of his poems, "October has
come," as presaging the revolution. His relationship with religion is
also complicated. He studied the Scriptures and was reared in the Russian
Orthodox Church, which he never renounced.
But the Czar exiled him to his family estate,
Mikhailovskoye, from 1824 to 1826, after the police intercepted a letter
in which he wrote that he was taking "lessons in pure atheism." The
Soviets portrayed him as an atheist.
Now, in honor of this latest anniversary, one overeager
regional governor, a former Communist functionary, has called for Pushkin
to be canonized as a saint, an offer the Russian Orthodox Church has
politely declined. But Patriarch Aleksy II will be present at birthday
festivities. Scholars are sponsoring conferences and writing books
analyzing the scriptural influences in Pushkin's works and the power of
his verse as a path to salvation.
Politicians also want a piece of him, with anticipated
Presidential contenders falling all over themselves to show their
knowledge of Pushkin. One of the latest editions of the poet's complete
works has an introduction by former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin,
something like having former President George Bush write a foreword to
Shakespeare.
Efforts to impose an official Pushkin, however, are what
created the phenomenon of the personal Pushkin, or "my Pushkin," as
Russians call him. "Nowhere else do you find my Byron or my Dostoyevsky,"
said Sergei Fomichev, the chief Pushkin scholar at the Pushkinsky Dom in
St. Petersburg. "Smart people each had their own Pushkin, to counteract
the pressure of the state's version of Pushkin."
Yet Fomichev's thought might apply to all Pushkin lovers,
Russian and non-Russian alike: "Everyone sees Pushkin in their own way."