Sunday, February 23, 2014

A parody, an empty show - Pushkin opens his Byron

We all enjoy a fiction that attacks fiction don’t we?  Madame Bovary and Don Quixote and so on.  Eugene Onegin belongs on the list.  Like the Cervantes novel, Pushkin’s poem both attacks and rehabilitates.

The title character, the bored dandy, is not much of a reader.  The quotation I used yesterday, about how books were dullness, deceit and raving, ends with Onegin decorating his bookshelves “in taffeta of mourning black” (One: XLIV, Johnston).  Books are dead.  Later we discover that Onegin does read, but narrowly – Lord Byron, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.  He seems to only like books in which he identifies with the main character.  Literature as a mirror.

Near the end of the novel Onegin turns to books to escape from heartache – “Gibbon and Rousseau, Manzoni and Chamfort…  and at times even a Russian” (Eight: XXXV, Johnston).  Not surprisingly, none of this works.  It does serve to remind me of one of the obstacles facing the reader of Eugene Onegin, a reason Nabokov wrote a thousand pages of commentary, why the Penguin edition still has over a hundred, one page of notes per two pages of text.  Of course I have read all of those authors (the ones I have not read I hid in the ellipses), and of course you have read them.  But some unintended distance is introduced.  Or so I guess.  This never seems to bother the Janeites.

The heroine’s reading is used more ingeniously.  Young, innocent Tatyana Larin seems to be as corrupted by literature as Emma Roualt when the novel begins, although her models are more elevated.  The perfect man is the title character of Samuel Richardson’s endless Sir Charles Grandison (1753), the perfect heroine the title character of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761).

From early on she loved romances,
they were her only food… and so
she fell in love with all the fancies
of Richardson and Rousseau.
Her father, kindly, open-hearted,
but dwelling in an age departed,
could see no harm in books; himself
he never took one from the shelf,
thought them a pointless peccadillo;
and cared not what his daughter kept
by way of secret tome that slept
until the dawn beneath her pillow,
His wife, just like Tatyana, had
on Richardson gone raving mad.  (Two: XXIX, Johnston, ellipses in original)

The latter experience is common for readers of Grandison.

Tatyana is not completely corrupted, though, since it turns out she has not read Byron or Melmoth or similar books – too naughty, I suppose.  She only reads them after she has fallen in love with her idealized Onegin, once he leaves his estate after his stupid duel (Sir Charles Grandison refuses to duel).  She in fact reads Onegin’s books, in Onegin’s library (“Lord Byron’s portrait on the wall”).  She reads not just the books but Onegin’s marginal notes, even noting passages “where a sharp nail has made a dent.”  She reads, in other words, not to find herself but to find Onegin, and what does she find?

Just an apparition,
a shadow, null and meaningless,
a Muscovite in Harold’s dress,
a modish second-hand edition,
a glossary of smart argot
a parody, an empty show?  (Seven: XXIV, Johnston, ellipses in original).

Fiction is both cause and cure.  Onegin just mimics his fictional models.  Tatyana critiques them.  He drifts, she matures.

Thomas Carlyle has a line in Sartor Resartus that always makes me laugh – “Close thy Byron; open they Goethe.”  Pushkin proves Carlyle wrong.  Tatyana finds wisdom by opening someone else’s Byron.

13 comments:

  1. Frist! I mean, it's also interesting to notice the list of authors Pushkin himself endorses, before ironically distancing himself from such a crass display of fanboyism with a couple of jokes. After her dream, Tatyana feels that:

    'But neither Virgil nor Racine, or Scott, or Byron, or Seneca, or even a fashion magazine might have had an effect upon her such as the book she was reading. This book was Martin Zadiedka's, my friends! The master of the Chaldeans wizards, the astrologer and diviner of dreams.'

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  2. That's right, Tatyana's cheap dream book. As she matures, she also abandons superstitions.

    I wonder what Seneca is doing on that list.

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    1. Being a sucker for secret plots, I have a little theory about Pushkin hinting how Lensky's death at the duel was a kind of suicide. That's where the references to Seneca, Chamfort and Lovelace, etc. would come into play.

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    2. Maybe it's Onegin seeking suicide - but he botches it.

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    3. We could delve further into Borgesburg and ask ourselves, does a man who, by the time he hits his mid-thirties has been part of 30 duels, have a death wish? Is Eugene Onegin the world's longest and most brilliant suicide note?

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    4. For anyone who wanders by and does not know what humblehappiness & I are talking about, the dueling scene and its surrounding apparatus really is very rich.

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  3. I don't remember exactly the text, but wasn't Grandison more Tatyana's mother reference rather than Tatyana's? And Tatyana's aunt in Petersburg? I saw the Vakhtangov Theater production last month and that how I remember the story. If she has read a lot, it seems to have been anything indifferently since her father didn't look at the books she took.
    XXIX

    From early on she loved romances,
    they were her only food... and so
    she fell in love with all the fancies
    of Richardson and of Rousseau.
    Her father, kindly, well-regarded,
    but in an earlier age retarded,
    could see no harm in books; himself
    he never took one from the shelf,
    thought them a pointless peccadillo;
    and cared not what his daughter kept
    by way of secret tome that slept
    until the dawn beneath her pillow.
    His wife, just like Tatyana, had
    on Richardson gone raving mad.

    And of course Tayana's reading mostly La clef des songes - the divination of dreams (I had an old french version of La clef des songes when I was a child and I can understand Tatyana; it's such a pleasure.

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  4. Catherine: ???

    That passage, which I used above, same translation and everything, specifically says that Tatyana "fell in love" with Richardson.

    Her father is indifferent, yes. Tatyana is not.

    She does not "mostly" read the dream book. She reads it after she has a bizarre dream.

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  5. Really ??? I have been walking through Rome the all day and it seems I'm quite tired. Sorry...

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  6. I even nearly lost my temper looking for that passage on this lousy Italian computer.

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  7. I wish I had been walking around Rome all day. How wonderful! That, and Italian computers, are the perfect excuse for all miscommunication.

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    1. Perfect excuse, isn't it ? To be forgiven, I promise to review Franz Michael Felder's Autobiography, Scenes from my life. A nineteenth century Austrian writer and peasant, in a remote place in the Alps. Completely in the Stifter's line.

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    2. I look forward to the review. Felder is a writer with no trace in English, just a rumor to me. He tried "to break the trade monopoly of the infamous cheese lords," which you have to like.

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