In Our Time - Eugene Onegin

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, the story of Eugene Onegin, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Pushkin (pictured above) began this in 1823 and worked on it over the next ten years, while moving around Russia, developing the central character of a figure all too typical of his age, the so-called superfluous man. Onegin is cynical, disillusioned and detached, his best friend Lensky is a romantic poet and Tatyana, whose love for Onegin is not returned until too late, is described as a poetic ideal of a Russian woman, and they are shown in the context of the Russian landscape and society that has shaped them. Onegin draws all three into tragic situations which, if he had been willing and able to act, he could have prevented, and so becomes the one responsible for the misery of himself and others as well as the death of his friend.With Andrew Kahn Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Edmund HallEmily Finer Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrewsand Simon Dixon The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Alexander Pushkin, born in 1799, is seen as the Shakespeare of Russian literature and his novel in verse, Yuji Noghien, as his masterpiece. It's the story of Unyagin, a disillusioned pop of Tatyana, who loves him but is not loved in return,

and the young poet Lensky on Yegan's friend. And Yegan kills Lensky in a duel, and when he eventually falls in love with Tatiana, it's too late. She has married someone else. Pushkin wrote this verse novel over almost eight years, mostly while exiled within the Russian Empire, serializing it and then publishing it whole in St. Petersburg in 1833, just four years before he too was killed in a duel one morning in 1837.

His reputation grew under the Tsars and reached a stratosphere, in Soviet Russia, where he became the national poet. With me to discuss Pushkin's Eugene and Yegan are Andrew Kahn, Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Emily Feiner, lecturer in Russian and comparative literature at the University of St Andrews, and Simon Dixon, the Sir Bernard Paz,

Professor of Russian History at University College London. Simon Dixon, can you give us some context about the Russian world into which Pushkin was born? Well, yes, the big question for Russia, in Pushkin's lifetime was how could an autocratic monarchy cope with the challenge posed by the French Revolution? In other words, how does Zaz, who in theory have no restriction on their power cope with a world in which multinational empires are threatened by nation-states

and in which a whole series of new radical, democratic and liberal ideas come up? And you can think of that in two ways. I think at one level, of course, it's an international challenge, and the big challenge at the beginning of Pushkin's lifetime comes from Napoleon, who came to power in France. France in the same year Pushkin was born 1799. And initially Napoleon seems unstoppable. He defeated the Austrians. He defeated the Prussians. He invaded Spain. Only comes a cropper when he invaded Russia in the summer of 1812. And there he began to meet his nemesis, partly because he was

overstretched, but primarily because the Russians had a way of dealing with him. They had a plan to defeat him. They pushed him out of Russia and they followed him all the way across Europe to northern France, so that by 1815, Congress of Vienna, Russia is the dominant power in Europe. And that had implications for the internal situation in Russia, because Zaire Alexander I had won. He defeated Napoleon, so the impetus for reform was relatively small. So all the Russian officers who came back from Europe, rather keen to see the social and political regime in Russia relaxed a little bit, simply couldn't succeed. they couldn't make it. Right, let's zoom in on Pushkin. He's born in 1799. He, as a boy,

sees this war. He sees this great victory of Napoleon whom he continues to idolize. We might come to that later. And can you tell us about the social structure? We'd put him in at the bottom of the aristocratic rung, but still an aristocrat. Yes. Pushkin occupied a rather distinctive place in the Russian social structure. I mean, you can see that in a number of ways. First of all, is obviously his family lineage, because on his mother's side, his great-grandfather was an African slave who'd come to Russia at the beginning of the 18th century

through the Ottoman slave trade, been taken up by the reignings at the time, Peter the Great, who was very fond of the exotic, and he'd gone on to become a great general. So by 1800, of course, the Hannibal's, as they were called, he took the name Hannibal, because of his military prowess, had been assimilated into the Russian aristocracy, but nevertheless they were still exotic

and Pushkin was interested in that. He tried to write a book about it, the Blackamore of Peter the Great. On the father's side, Pushkins liked to claim they went back to the year dot, but they were actually really quite modest Muscovite boyars, traceable to the 15th century. And Pushkin's worry was that people like his family

had been somehow usurped, somehow pushed into the background by a whole bunch of new service nobles who'd grown up in the 18th century to staff the Russian government. But nevertheless, as part of the aristocratic structure, he got a very good education, well, good for the time, languages particularly,

he got a sinecure really in the civil service. He thought of himself as an aristocrat, they had estates, dilapidated though they were, and somebody swilling around not enough as it ever was. So he's part of that group in that way. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, he had an astonishing education because he was one of the first 30 boys

to be admitted to the new, at Sarskosilor, the new school set up in 1811 to provide a sort of elite group of state officials. Many of the other boys in that group went on to become ministers under Nicholas I. And they all stayed very much as a group. They bonded together. They had regular reunions on the date of the foundation of the school, which was 19th of October. And that was a big date for Pushkin. He wrote several poems connected with that on the dates of the reunion.

So he was very much part of this top group. And as a result, came into contact with the Zah. was in person. And Andrew Kahn, he also came into contact with people from the aristocracy like himself and from the military who bubbled up in the 1820s when he was in his mid-20s into radical groups because as was outlined by, as has just been outlined, the idea of a Tsar was contested and these radical groups burgeoned and he was part of them in what way? Well, I think if one looks a little bit more at his education, Simon Dixon has already talked about the Lise. Quite a few of the teachers at the Lise were more reform-minded than one might have expected.

A particularly important figure is a constitutional lawyer named Kunizin, who knows all about revolutionary theory, lectured to Pushkin and his contemporaries on the reform of serfdom, and was really in the vanguard, wrote a book, which is informed by Kant. So actually, Bushkin's generation, looking ahead, has a certain number of progressive ideas which they were hoping to see implemented, and those aspirations for reform were dashed. After Pushkin finished school in, he moved to St. Petersburg because he took up this sinecure in the foreign office,

and he found himself in an environment in which, some of these people were joining literary societies, which were, let's say, on the left. They had liberal ideas. They were, for the most part, not Republican. For the most part, they were not in favour of regicide. But it's very, very hard to separate out in groups like the Green Lamp or the Society of Salvation.

It's very hard to separate out the kind of literary progressiveness and the political progressiveness. He's already writing poetry. He publishes his first successful poem when he's 31. It can be fairly reasonably called a prodigy, and he would be regarded by that by his contemporaries. And he wrote poems which were thought to be very dodgy at the time, sorry to use a low-class word like that,

but still, in terms of the Tsar's position, an ode to freedom, for instance. Yes, so the Oat to Freedom is really a landmark. Pushkin never acknowledged his authorship. It said there are lots of anecdotes about the composition. It said that he wrote it, looking at the Mikhailovsky Palace, where Paul I, the son of Catherine the Great, was assassinated. He wrote it in the flat of a liberal-minded political economist named Tuggenyev, and it's a work which essentially holds up a warning sign to kings

and says if you don't govern in accordance with natural law, you will meet the fate of Paul I. And in its very last answer describes the murder of Paul I. This poem circulated in manuscript, the authorities knew about it, particularly nasty spy named Karazin, denounced Pushkin as a brat to the Governor-General of St. Petersburg. That must have heard. And the prodigious that gifted Pushkin found himself on Alexander I's hit list, as it were, and he was sent in to what we call exile, although in technical terms he was transferred.

He was transferred to the south of Russia. Was it then he was transferred to Crimea for four years? Yes, he was transferred to Crimea. He started out in Yakuterninislav, and then spent three years in Kishinov and one year in Odessa. And he had a hell of a time. A hell of a good time. He had a hell of a good time, but he also mixed with... No, what are you talking about? We've got to define that. He is a dissipated... We can't just say develop a good time. He wasn't at fun first, was he? So what was he doing? No. Well, he was joining things like a Masonic Lodge called... That doesn't sound like a good time. Well, I think in those days this was a place for liberal-minded people to meet.

He was hobnobbing with, well, a former girlfriend of Byron's. He was writing lots of poetry, including a blasphemous poem called the Gabrielliad, in which the Archangel Gabriel has a bit of hanky-panky with the Virgin Mary. He was not relenting in his descent and his commitment to writing what he wanted. But this is important for the poem itself. Was he, as we're just coming to during the poem, Was he dissolute? Was he gambler? Was he rolling up debts? Was he a superfluous man? Well, I don't think he was superfluous. He had a purpose in life, which was to make sure that his poems, as you said, he had a great success in 1820 with a rollicking narrative poem called Ruslani Ludmila.

And Ludmila, he had a readership. But he was meeting with radicals. He met an English atheist. He doesn't name a materialist, which suggests that he, at the time, had lost all faith entirely, and his liberal principles were developing, and he wrote poems which were disseminated amongst radical groups. So exile, Emily Finner, consists of being not being allowed to St. Petersburg, otherwise he seems to be fairly unrestrained. I think that's right, and I think that even though I wouldn't call him a superfluous man, being sent so far away from the centre of life.

I was using a phrase he used just to get a move on. My fault, my. Sorry. He was so far away from St Petersburg that he probably felt superfluous in that sense. So can we give some idea he is a poet? He reads a lot. How was he, how was he been mentioned,

how influenced was he by Byron? I think he was very influenced by Byron. Byrne he wrote Yevgenia Nyigen, Byron was really an old influence, I think you could say. He'd got over Byron by then. He didn't want to be an egotistical, romantic. he wanted to also be funny. But Byron was phenomenally successful

and influenced a great number of young writers and Pushkin did take up a form that was like the Byron form, like the form in Child Herald. So he was still, he was there, even if a bit of a background. What else was he reading? I think that's absolutely right. But he, from my point of view, it's very interesting that he read Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern.

Again, a very loose novel that is a novel about writing a novel. Stern was important to him Shakespeare was also important to him We don't think that he read either of those authors in English In fact he read them in French He was interested in learning English But it doesn't look like he had much success

Until the end of the 1820s And so you can't have just read What else was he reading? What else was he reading? I mean he usually studied with references Russo, yes Russo, Hume He was not reading

but listening to folk tales, usually thought to be told, by his old nurse when he was in exile in Mikhailovsky, in his country estate. Was there much Russian that he was reading? Somebody said in one of your notes that we might love letters in French, we go to work in German and we talk to our servants in Russian. I think it's that we shout at our servants in Russian. Yes, well corrected, yes. Yes, I think that's right.

I mean, people like to say that Pushkin started Russian literature. I'm not sure that's really true. There was an awful lot of literature in Russian, prose in Russian, and of course poetry in Russian before Pushkin. There was a lot of translation as well into Russian before then. So someone like Stern had been translated twice by the time Pushkin came to read him. I think Pushkin still read him in French, but he was available in Russian. I'm very briefly sketched out the plot of Pinyagin.

Could you develop that? Yes, of course. So the way the novel begins, we have a day or rather a night in the life of a young dandy in St. Petersburg society, going to the opera, the ballet, etc. This young man, Yevgeny, inherits property. His uncle dies. He wasn't very fond of his uncle. But he gets the chance to go to the country. No, the cynical about having to look after him, more or less saying, will you hurry up and die so I can get my hands on the money? Which is an interesting way to start a poem. Yes. Or a novel, indeed.

he's not portrayed as the most likable character right from the beginning, I think. Once he's in the countryside, he's extremely bored. He was also bored in high society in St. Petersburg. But in the countryside, he seems to appreciate his surroundings to some extent, but he makes friends with a local family. He meets Lienski, a returned student from Germany, who's a romantic poet. He meets the local family who have two daughters. One is Olga.

she's not very interesting. One is Tatiana, who really attracts both Anyaegin and the narrator of the whole novel. Tatiana falls in love with Anyaigen almost immediately, but we don't have any information about their first meeting. She writes him a letter. He then rejects her in the garden. He gives her a kind of sermon, in a sense.

Then we have a duel. There's a party, and at the party Anyaegin dances with the wrong person with Olga, who's actually Lensky's betrothed. And Lienski,

I suppose, well, Lienzky is very romantic, so he thinks that a... Lenskis his young friend, whom he's met, he's taken up, Lensky, they become friends, they say through boredom because they're the only two interesting people in this,

in this part of the country. That's right. And he's a younger man. and he's killed in this duel. Yes. He's killed in the jewel by Anyaegian. That's right. And then he is away.

And he comes back to Ayn Tatiana, married. Married in high society, presiding over a ball and a salon, beautiful, stately, refined. And he falls in love with her. He writes her a letter. In fact, he writes her several letters. And then she rejects him in a beautifully phrased rejection. and then the novel breaks off. Yes.

It doesn't really end. Yes. Thank you very much for that. It's probably you had to sort of race through it, but I think the listeners are now fully informed. They've got all they need to know to know what we're going to talk about. And if you're getting a thumbs up around the tables.

Simon Dixon, would he, would in Widenjiann Jagen in the verse novel? It's in stanzas. There are over 300 stanzas. Would it have been a recognisable character type in Russia at that time? Well, certainly lots of features of his character. character would have been very recognisable. Eminie says that he's introduced in this first canto of the novel, and he's subjected to some wonderfully satirical treatment,

and it sounds a bit like the sort of school report that Pushkin would have had at the Lise. He's a clever chap, but a bit superficial, not very profound, doesn't work very hard. And the symbol of all that is the French language. He's very good at French, but it's a symbol of sort of fecklessness and affectation in his case. And superficiality in everything. This is a man who's, he's off with the latest fashion. whatever it might be. If it's sartorial, he's a dandy. If it's intellectual, he's interested in the sort of political economy that Andrew talked about. He's read Adam Smith, for example, though, of course he hasn't

digested at all. So all this is a sort of sense of a superficial person who can't quite grasp anything. And that takes you on to what you mentioned earlier on about the gambling. You know, he's a card player. He spends a lot of time at balls and dances. And when he's not doing that, he's playing cards. Now, cards, it's a symbol of sociability. It's very nice to join in, but of course it's a great symbol of boredom. Bordom you've mentioned a couple of times. Big theme in this... His attention span is very, very short, isn't it? By the time he's 25, he's bored stiff of everything in St. Petersburg, after three days in the

country when he's got his uncle's estate, the poor chap having dropped dead, he's bored with three days. First day's okay, second there's a bit of a worry, third days had it. The boredom is, it's a sign of social stagnation really. It's a sign of the sort of thing we were talking about earlier on. You can't actually do anything, Russia. You've got a strong sense of self-worth. You've got a strong sense that you want to do something. But this isn't the sort of

society in which you can fulfil yourself. So you might as well just play colours. There are other options. Pushkin is insistent that Anyaegin is a bad reader. He reads, but he's not really thinking about what he reads. He doesn't understand it. And that's very important in this novel

because Tatiana, on the other hand, is what we might call a good reader. She gets involved in what she reads. She gets passionate about what she reads and she processes it. So that everybody in this novel is defined by the way they read. Andrew, Andrew Kahn,

there's the narrator figure there who's playful, elusive. Can you tell the listeners more about the narrator? Well, and he plays a part. He plays a big part. And in fact, in the course of the novel, he counter-banets as Tatiana, as Anyaigen fades from view, particularly after the duel.

And as Emily has already said, Lauren Stern, with his gift for digression, is one important influence on the form of Anyaegin, a novel in verse, which has missing stanzas and loops back in time. The narrate is clearly a proxy for Pushkin. There's a famous frontispiece, an engraving that shows Pushkin, recognisably Pushkin, on the bank of the Nivar standing next to Anyegin. So it's quite clear that, and Pushkin actually in Chapter 1, in Chapter 1 says, don't confuse me with Byron. I don't equate myself with, you know, my hero, unlike Byron, who suffers from that limitation. However, the narrator who's chatty, who's very literary, who's playful, who was a friend of Anyegians, he makes it clear. He really, and has certain things in common with Pushkin, for instance, he talks about his nanny. Well, Pushkin liked to hear these folk tales from his nanny, and that was well known.

There's a great overlap between Bushkin's biography, and the reader can see this, particularly at the beginning of chapter 8, where the narrator talks about his youth in the leesé. And I think for all readers, you didn't require special insider knowledge to know, to recognise that. Folk area has been mentioned once or twice, and he deliberately puts in. There are folk stories introduced,

the young women singing in the field, singing songs they don't want the men to hear, or they do, but they don't, that sort of thing. and he puts it in very deliberately. Why do you think he does that, Emily? I think it makes a great novel. I think that he doesn't want to write just a society tale. He doesn't want to write another version of Child Harold.

He wants to write something Russian, whatever that means. So when Tatiana is in love and has been rejected, she turns to divination. She looks at fortune-telling. And then the novel produces a wonderful dream for her, which she tries to interpret. What are we to make of her letter before we get to The Dream, which is one of the best songs in the Chikovsky melodies,

in the Chikovsky Opera? The letter is very interesting. Pushkin, using the narrator, frames it for many stanzas. He tells us about it's going to be written like this. Actually, of course, she would have written it in French, so I'm going to translate it. So before we ever get there, we've heard an awful lot about this letter. When we actually read it, it's the first time

that stanza form, that persistent stanza form has been broken. So it's not divided into sonnets, if you like. The letter itself is a love letter, certainly, but it's not clear really from the letter whether Tatiana is expecting some kind of outcome. It's very open-ended. She wishes that she hadn't ever met him, I think, and she really, she's, it's a passionate letter,

but she's not quite clear what she's asking for. I also, when I read that letter, I'm not particularly sure she's writing it to Oneyagin. I think she's writing it to herself. I mean, I know it's wonderful, isn't it, academic? But actually, never mind, yes, I thought she was writing it to him, and I thought she was passionate in love with him. And the pre, the stanzas before there, he says,

he says she was breathless, she could think of nothing else, she couldn't sleep. I thought he describes wonderfully the obsession that sort of maybe we can't call them teenagers the young, the youthful, obsession with being overwhelmed by love and she was for Eugen

not for anybody else and I didn't think particularly for herself but never mind I could be completely wrong. One way of thinking about the letter just drawing on something Emily said is that although it seems like an outpouring of naive emotion, absolutely passionate

and she is seducing him. She is really writing a letter of seduction in the manner of one of Richardson's heroes. But when you look closely at the text, you see there are not... Yes, very close to the English novel, lots of allusions to her reading,

the novels of Rousseau, for instance. So the connection between life and the feeling a character can have, but also what they've been reading, is very close to the surface there. And she is performing passion in that sense. But I think she's also expressing it. Am I up for gumptory?

Or is this not a letter about love? It is. It is a letter about love. It's a letter about love, but how does she know how to write a love letter like this? Well, you don't have to know it to write a love letter. You just have to know how to write. And then you're in love with somebody. You write anything accompanied to your head.

And because it's about love, this is a love letter. No? Yeah. Yeah. That's convincing. Andrew, yeah. Well, by contrast, if you look at Unyagin's rejection, so in the next chapter, he appears and tells her, Thank you very much. I appreciated your sentiments, but I couldn't possibly return them.

It's very, very interesting that those stanzas, which are incorporated by Tchaikovsky in the opera, verbatim, they're not literary at all. They're very blunt. They're not novelistic. They're a very frank and counter statement that owe hardly anything at all to literature. So there's a juxtaposition there between her imagination, which is also fully alive in the dream, that great dream, and his woodenness. Can we come to the idea of Russia, can we contextualise in the sense of Russia at the time? Tatiana became in the Soviet area and late 90s,

the great mother, not mother, but the great valiant mother Russia figure. I think on Yegan's rejection of poetry, what it can, I think it was reasonably honorable. Out of the blue comes this torrent of affection and torrent of demand in a way, and he meets her immediately, next day in the garden, says,

I'm very sorry, I don't feel like this for you. And just because you feel like this for me doesn't mean that I've got to feel like this for you. What do you think? Well, you're quite right. Of course, Dacieski, no less, thought that Tatiana was quintessentially Russian. And we're told in the poem,

she doesn't quite know why, but she has this very close affinity with the landscape, with the environment, with the climate, everything she is integral to Russia. And, of course, there's this sort of moral involvement that we'll get to in talking about her love relationship with Anyaegin. But it's a bit more complicated than that because she actually, of course, speaks and reads

in French. We're told that she resists Russian, like a lot of ladies, Pushkin says. And the more we learn about Russia at the time, that certainly seems to be true. There seems to be absolutely no contradiction, even in an era of romantic nationalism, between patriotism and Russianness and speaking in French. In this case, French isn't to do with affectation or fecklessness, at all. It's to do with that. And there's a reason for that, and that is that in this period, in order to be Russian, you have to be a citizen of the wider world. You have to have this involvement with the big cosmopolitan world as a whole. And the reason why Yvgen

was immediately received as a very important piece of literature by Bielinski, for example, a great Russian critic, was that here somehow Pushkin had managed to synthesize the sort of folk elements and the superstitious stuff that we've been talking about with the greater literary tradition and he managed to synthesize them together, just as Glinker would later do in his opera life for the Tsar. Andrew, can you just type in a loose ends about the similarities between Pushkin's life and the life he gives to Unyagin? Well, I think actually the differences are perhaps more revealing than the similarities.

Yes, they're both aristocratic, yes, they both are landed gentry, both are well-read, as Simon said. Pushkin's school report would perhaps not have been the most glowing. But Pushkin is not, unlike the narrator, the narrator has a famous fascination or fetish for feet. So far as we know, Pushkin, who was a ladiesman, did not share that particular erotic taste. Unlike Anyaegin, he, you know, wasn't wooden, was very charming, quite seductive. Their reading is similar, but Anjegin, says, or rather the narrator

says, Avaniagin, he doesn't like poetry. And that's meant to suggest his commitment, perhaps, to political thought rather than to poetry. And so there's a gap between Pushkin and his hero, and similarly, as I said, there's a greater sort of overlap or coincidence

between the narrator and Pushkin. The duel, sorry. Well, and because, yes, the dual idea, and he is killed in a duel at the end. and he is involved in more than one duel, isn't he? And, Yeguer, Puskin, it is said that he was involved in 29 duels of one kind or another. Wow. Unlucky 29 then, was it? Unlucky 29, yeah. I must remember that.

So they share that kind of sense of honour as an aristocratic badness. And it's illegal, though, isn't it? And so they're taking that sort of risk. They're against the regime by doing it in the first place. Yes, and Puskin is a gambler as well. We'd already talked about gambling, boredom, But a duel is illegal and there is a great risk involved. Emily, once or twice we've referred to the episode in which Tatania has a dream. Could you describe that? Yeah, this happens at the very centre of the novel and it really looks back and it looks forwards, like kind of mirror.

In the dream, Tatiana is running away from something. She's running through the snow, it's winter, wonderful descriptions of snow. and the Russian countryside there. She tries to cross a river, she doesn't manage, and suddenly a bear appears and helps her across. The bear carries her to a little hut in the forest, and this hut is full of a kind of noisy, raucous dinner party, full of bizarre monsters,

sort of parts of different animals joined together. And presiding over this table is Anyaigan. When they noticed Tatiana, peeping in at the door, they all shout, she's mine, she's mine. But Anyaegin replied, no, she's mine, and rescues her from this assembly. Then suddenly, when she's outside on a bench, and Olga appears, and so does Lienzky. And suddenly there is a sharp knife, and we assume that Anyaegen kills Lienzky, which of course prefigures what is about to happen, not in the dream. but in the basic story.

It's an extraordinary passage, isn't it? Is this something taken from a folk tale, or is this, as we far as we know, completely invented? I think there are lots of elements of folk tales, huts in the forest, this kind of thing. Being carried off by a bear? Being carried off by a bear. It's also a running away dream, I suppose you could say,

but I think that it's different bits and pieces of folk tales all stuck together. Andri, you ought to come in? Well, just to say that, I mean, Pushkin had an ample collection of divination books. There's a famous German book, which was known to be in his library. One of these divination books has a motto saying, if you see a bear, you marry. So clearly there's a grotesque parody here of a marriage ritual, a funeral, but also her anxiety about not having married anjegian,

but she's on the brink of going to Moscow to be married off, and she knows that. So anxiety is part of it. And what's Tatiana's reaction to this dream? She immediately gets a book from under her pillow that is a book on how to interpret your dream. And she finds no success. It doesn't work. Who had written this How to Interpret Your Dream, bro?

Martin Zedeker. Was it any good? Not for her. Let's talk about the jewel for a moment. Can you give that a bit of context? Simon? Yes, well, as you say, dueling was illegal, but it was adopted by the Russian nobility for a very straightforward reason. They were quite anxious that their corporate privileges and that their personal autonomy simply couldn't be preserved by the state. The state

behaved in an arbitrary way towards them. In theory, Catherine the Great's Charter to the nobility had exempted the nobility from corporal punishment, but then her son was quite happy is our poor to lash about with his cane and sort of beat people up. And there were all sorts of stories of unauthorised floggings and so on. So this was a very hierarchical and arbitrary system of violence. By comparison with the duel, which as Andrew says is based on a sort of aristocratic system of honour. And so that was the way of escaping arbitrariness. I mean, the difficulty, of course, is it's very easy to develop a kind of idealised picture of a duel

in which everybody's a perfect gentleman and it all works according to plan and it's quite clear that it didn't always work like that and we can see that in the case of this duel between Anyagin and Liyanski where Anyagin turns up late and he brings a second who is a commoner rather than a nobleman there are all sorts of breaches to the code

what we missed out and if you could help us by telling us and being reasonably brief about Anir are the Decembrists the radical move against the Tsar in the mid-18 of which Pushkin was but kind of wasn't public department, but he was still branded with it and how radical were there. Can you just give us a fix on that?

Because it's important for his reputation later and then. Yes, no, it's very important indeed. When Pushkin was in the south, particularly in Kichinov and Odessa, he met a number of people who were involved in a conspiracy. Some of them, two of them in particular were picked up, and Alexander I, the first and his... security services as it were, were sort of on the alert. But there was a northern society as well.

And the Northern Society continued to meet in secret. In 1825 on the 14th of December, at the coronation of Nicholas I, there was an attempt to mount a pooch. Pushkin at this point, as Emily's already said, was on the family estate, a ramshackle place in Mikhailovska, very, very far away. He did not know about the plot. And although he'd sniffed out various conspiracies,

really from 1817 was aware that things were afoot. He'd never really been trusted for one reason or another with any secret information. What was Q1 reason we'll do? Why hadn't he been trusted? Too childlike, too much a poet. Too loquacious. And too loquacious and too likely to blow the people's cover. So he was actually not in St. Petersburg when this happened. He was summoned back in the summer of 18th.

the autumn of 1826 by Nicholas I, the new Tsar and pardoned. But this was after five of the Decembrists had been hanged. And as Simon said, really from the mid-18th century, corporal punishment had been abolished for the nobility. So their execution and the exile of over 120, I think, members of the gentry, was quite a shocking historical moment. And Pruskin found himself positioning himself between the expression of sympathy for members of his own clenry.

class and people he admired and trying to accommodate the Tsar who had made himself the poet's personal censor. So he was kind of caught in a double bind there. Yes, he was playing both ends against the middle, wasn't it? I mean, you can't blame him. He wanted to survive, which is fair enough. Yes, absolutely. He was in an impossible position, made worse as time went on, because Nicholas I became Pushkin's personal creditor, his gambling, gambling debts,

continued to mount. His publications were not commercially successful for the most part. The marriage didn't work very well. The marriage didn't work very well. We had a gambler and a spendthrift shack up and Nicholas I, all too readily advanced credits. And Pushkin was publishing less and less in the 1830s. Emily, when we get to the second part, as it were, she falls in love with him and he rejects her. He comes back, sees her in great style, holding a salon. It's a very substantial person. He falls in love with her and she rejects him. Can you talk about that?

Yes. Yes. I mean, Tatiana really reveals the symmetry of the novel in her response. She refers back to what she said to him, if you like, throwing it back in his face, I suppose you could say. But she is not the emotional person that she once was. her thoughts are well-formed, organised. And she rejects Anya again because she is married, ultimately. And that's the end of it.

She does say that she loved him, even that she still loves him. She also shows a kind of nostalgia for the old days. She remembers her old bookshelf and the garden where she used to live before she became a princess, if you like, in St. Petersburg. but really the two letters should be read together because they match each other very nicely. Yeah. And she became, in her own right, a figure of great regard in Russian,

not only in Russian literature, but in Russian, that idea of who was a good person, who was a great person that the Russians could look up to. I think that's right. I think morally speaking, she makes the right decision, obviously, and she makes it in a nuanced way. It's important that throughout Anyaegin, we hear Tatiana's voice. We get to read her words and we get to hear her words.

And the narrator really privileges those words. She never just says something. It's always introduced with compassion and empathy. He looks after her very well, isn't he? He does. Yes. Throughout the novel poem. Simon, he was dead four years after the publication of Aminjian.

Andrew has given us to understand. that he was on the skids anyway. Do you think he would have ridden more or what? Well, it's very difficult to know, but he could have... He managed to write in those four years, although he wrote less, he wrote two very important works, both about the same event, the Pugachev Revolt at the 1770s, a really marvellous miniaturised history, a great work of scholarship in lots of ways,

alongside a fictionalised treatment, the captain's daughter. And that ends, of course, in Tsarsko's-Selor, with Catherine virtually on stage, The whole manuscript is dated 19th of October, 1836, that magic date for the Lise. So in many ways, it's kind of business as usual. On the other hand, as Andrew says, debts are mounting up. Which is okay he's getting them paid by the time, isn't it? Well, I don't, I'm not sure that that's the case, actually. He was seriously in trouble.

He became more and more depressed, and with depression came bouts of anger, uncontrollable sort of choleric moments. And these were responsible, I think, for the increasing number of declarations of duels, you know, that he just lost it, really. And then his mother died at Easter 1836. So by 1836, when you're approaching the final duel with the brother-in-law, Dantes, I think there's a sense that he, already members of his group are beginning to die out. He's certainly not the first. He's a sense that there's not a great future ahead of him. Andrew, you want to come in on?

Well, I think that last poem in the 19 October cycle, which talks about our little group, which shone so beautifully and is now thinning out is a great meditation and mortality and it's a universal meditation mortality. I think he would have continued to produce certainly works of criticism. He's a very active book reviewer, literary critic. He's very keen to have successes in prose.

He's working through different prose forms than the novel is a genre. He has his very successful historical novel. There are fragments. But also I think it's important to say that some of his greatest poems were unpublished at his death, and some of them were written in the last years. Bronze Horseman, which is one of course the great masterpieces,

canonical works of Russian literature, was written in 1833. So I think he's still firing on all cylinders, but one can't ignore the depression and the real difficulties he faced. Emily, what would you say his impact has been on Russian literature? His impact has been enormous. Every writer I can think of has said something about him, even written something in response to something he wrote. In the Soviet Union, he was obviously very important.

There, his reputation as a Decemberist was exaggerated greatly. So they like him because he, as they thought, he had been a radical. He was a revolutionary, in fact. And had he been alive in the Soviet Union, he would have been a revolutionary. He also created the Russian language something of great pride. That's not necessarily true. but that was one of the aspects that were important. He was an innovator of form as well.

He created a new type of novel. And then if you were a dissident, of course, he was cruelly censored by the Tsar. He was repressed. So there was really something for everyone there. And that legacy continues having? Yes, it certainly does. I mean, if you count the statues of Alexander Pushkin

in the Contrussia Federation, he'd be pretty near the top. Yeah. And people still learn, Mr. Oh, absolutely. Yes, he's chosen to... I was talking to someone last night who... who'd learned to, still remember, great chunks of Pushkin.

Yes. Yes. And that legacy, do you think it's a manufactured legacy, or is it one of the most ten important works of literature, as has been said by one of you? It's a manufactured legacy which works because it can be sustained from within, because it's real. It's both. Yeah. Well, I think Pushkin's fortunes, his reputation in Russia,

even more than abroad, has been a litmus test of political currents, the attitudes, the ideology of a regime. In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union fell apart, Puskin became the star of a punk film, for instance. So he's protean, and in that respect, perhaps Shakespearean, but I agree entirely with Simon and Emily in saying that he's a wonderful, wonderful writer. But his own biography has been recast to suit other purposes, which does happen.

Final word? So, yeah, you could look at the history of Pushkin through chocolate wrappers. Pushkin is always a good decision to put on, to brand your chocolate. Well, there we go. There we go. Thank you very much, Emily. Andrew Kahn and Simon Dixon.

Next week we'll be talking about Plato's Republic and his question, is it always better to be just than unjust? We'll also be talking about exploring ideas of the soul and the value of poetry. societies. There's a bit of a connection now. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Sorry to spring the last one on you.

But no, you get the number, perfect, I've got a vodka label. I've got a vodka label. Can we, are we on? Are we on? Right. You're on now. When I was picking up on Emily's chocolate wrapper, a former students of mine sent me a wonderful vodka label. That particular, that particular distillery no longer exists. but it shows Pushkin sipping vodka with his nanny. And the brand is named for her. Adina Radjanovna is the name of the vodka. There was an advert for a computer

which showed a girl at a laptop in 1999, the anniversary, and the first lines of the letter. I'm writing to you, what more can I do? Of course, everybody would have recognised that, Tatiana's letter. Not on any cigarettes, you see, there's ours on cigarettes. There's a wonderful branch of it. Peter the Great and it says, Peter,

always first, it says. How did you want Tolstoy first think of him? Oh, he adored him. Tolstoy had great sympathy for lyric poets, although the radicals didn't like Pushkin,

mind you, they didn't like any lyric poets. Pushkin admired him as a lyric poet above all. Tolstoy admired him. Yes, Telstoy admired him greatly. He did indeed, yes. We didn't really talk about realism, but I think the idea

that Pushkin represents reality in a new way, really attracted Tolstoy. He notices the details. The details of what happened in the fields and... Details of what happened in the fields, but just, yes, he sees things as if for the first time, you might say. To take one example, so I think someone mentioned the chorus of maids out in the field harvesting berries.

And that's an example of the folklorization of the work, but is also well known that landowners, us there, serves to sing while collecting berries because that meant they couldn't steal them. If they were singing, they couldn't eat them. So you could say that that's folklore. You could also say it's a detail that has a bit of evidence. That's in the poem.

It's at the end of chapter one. It's absolutely right. There's quite a lot of detail in the poem about the difficulty of agricultural reform, actually. When Yevgeny Aguigna arrives at his estate for the first time, He tries to make life easier for the serfs, and the only result is to irritate the noble landowners nearby. And then further on in the poem,

you get discussions of other modernisers who merely irritate the peasants. Serfs didn't always want to be told how to manage things. I mean, Simon knows better than I as a historian, but I mean, there are two main systems of serfdom, and Yvgeny moves his peasants onto the quit rent system, which is thought to be a bit more equitable. But it means it's a cash transaction, essentially, and landowners didn't like it,

they got less work out of the peasantry. But I think it actually keys into something we haven't talked about, which is the genesis of Yvgeny, and I don't know whether you're interested in the draft versions. But he's not, I mean, if you look at the total amount of text, Pushkin wrote, you see that he had much,

he had plans for more rounded character, someone who was more sympathetic, who had an inner emotional life, who developed, who was much more a partner for Tatiana, who wasn't just the kind of Peter's, Dandy, who dabbles, but actually was, as Emily said, a reader. And this was paired away after the December's rebellion.

In 1827, 1828, he took some radical steps in pruning away really quite substantial amounts of Finnish text, which took us into, you know, Anyaegian's world, into his library, into his notebooks, into a diary. But, and also there are two missing chapters which were dropped. there's something called a fragment called Angein's journey

which does exist in which Pushkin published as part of the serialization and that made it clear that after he murders Lensky he feels remorse and he goes traveling there's a chapter 10 which he destroyed

because it looks as though it was subversive and it seems as though he was plotting to put Anyaegian on Senate Square on the 14th of December 1825 to radicalize him as it were. He did. He was in a lot of trouble 1827, 1828.

The church was up in arms because he published, or rather a blasphemous poem had circulated. The Tsar hauled him in personally and said, that thing you wrote in 1821 about the Virgin Mary, go on, confess. You did it, didn't you? And he had to confess. So his wings were clipped. And it changed, I think, the presentation

of the hero, the portrait greatly. You said a lot of... Excuse me, you said a lot of people written in Russian before him. Did he draw on them at all? I think he certainly did. I mean, in terms of poetry, there are some fantastic poets before Pushkin,

and he was very careful to show his respect for them and his deference to them. In a way that, for example, he doesn't with Byron. He is flippant about Byron in Anyagen. He's not flippant about Zhukovsky, for example. Van Wiesen. Von Wiesin is an interesting example,

an 18th century dramatist at court who writes to classic satires and has quite a political agenda and stands up for the nobility and there are epigraphs from Van Vizen and quotations. There'd been a great debate all through the 18th century in language terms, how to create

a Russian literary language, which was both classically justifiable and at the same time would include corporate popular speech and so on. And to get the balance was very difficult. And in the 18th century, they didn't manage it. And that's one reason why most of the time one doesn't read the 18th century literature,

unless your people like us is in work. But then, you know, they're not in wide distribution. Whereas Pushkin manages to create this extraordinarily malicious literary language. It is one. Yeah. It's remarkable. So that's one reason why he says Shakespeare, also rolled into one. It goes like lovely undone to fear, all that, isn't it?

And at the same time, brevet in precision. I mean, if you see a column of Pushkin in Russian, it just this tiny little column runs down the middle of the page. Any translation, no matter how brilliant, is always more wordy and more wordy. The right translation is that. I've got the pen right, anyway. I can't remember it.

I was worried for a moment it might have been one of you three, but it... Charles Johnson is a famous version or Stanley Mitchell. They're amazing translations of it, I think. People used to always say that, Oh, it's untranslatable. I think there are 13 translations, and most of them have one of Britsch. That's the worst.

That's the worst. Not the best, is it? No, the worst. The least poetic, I suppose. It's a reference book. He was a pedant, was it? He was. He was.

He was. Pushkin says that of Farnierkin. So he's a learned man and a penit. A producer is going to come and cut you off in your prime. No, he's a great offer. Anything from the sam of our tea? I'd love a cup of coffee. Coffee would be great.

Okay. And for more podcasts on arts and ideas from the BBC, follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Program.