American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Pukin, Victor Hugo, the Perilous Ordeal, and the True-Blue Hero Author(s): Richard Gregg Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 438-445 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308849 . Accessed: 16/03/2011 04:44
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PUSKIN, VICTOR HUGO, THE PERILOUS ORDEAL, AND THE TRUE-BLUE HERO
Richard Gregg, Vassar College

I Puskin's opinion of Hugo's poetry was guarded,1 he found much Although to admire in the latter's early prose. True, Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne (1829), a novel-length indictment of capital punishment, got mixed reviews from the poet.2 But when Notre Dame de Paris appeared in 1831, Puskin found "a great deal of charm in [Hugo's] invention" and particularly admired the "spine-tingling" fall of the priest Frollo (XIV, 172). Moreover if-to alter Wilde's epigram-imitation is the artist's highest form of tribute, then the imprint which these works (the deprecated as well as the admired) left on Puskin's fictional oeuvre must be included in any assessment of the two writers' relationship. That these traces are to be found in the two most important prose works of Puskin's last years and may, conjecturally, be linked to certain crucial events in the poet's life can only augment their interest. The narrative "spring" which, when pressed, releases the action of "The Queen of Spades" is of course Tomskij's anecdote about his grandmother's secret of the three winning cards and the deep impression which it makes on Germann. The central and pivotal scene of that same story is no less obviously the fatal midnight confrontation of the hero and the old Countess in the latter's bedroom. It is indicative of Puskin's abundantly documented capacity to absorb literary influences that both the "spring" and the scene, both the anecdote and the encounter, are so clearly prefigured in Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne that coincidence would seem to be out of the question. The former of these anticipations, first noted by V. V. Vinogradov (89), is brief. Near the end of Hugo's novella the doomed narrator is accosted in his cell by his jailer, who makes a curious request. Strapped for money and obsessed by the bizarre notion that the ghost of an executed person possesses the power of clairvoyance, he implores the narrator to visit him on the night after his execution and reveal to him the three winning
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lottery numbers which would make him a rich man. The condemned man refuses (233). The episode takes up barely a page. But its fertilizing capacity appears to have been considerable. For the jailer's attempt in solitary surroundings to extort from the hero three numbers which will make his fortune prefigures the indigent Germann's vain attempt to extort from the old Countess-also fated to die-the secret of the three cards.3 Moreover, the hope expressed by Hugo's supplicant that the dead person's ghost will visit his rooms on the day after the execution to disclose the winning numbers patently foreshadows the Countess' ghostly visit to Germann's chambers after her death to disclose information of a very similar sort. The second Hugolian anticipation may be said to supplement the first, illuminating, as it does, the same pivotal scene from a different angle. A few hours after the jailer's fruitless visit the hero falls asleep and has a dream. It is night. He and some unnamed friends are in his study (cabinet). Alarmed by a sinister noise emanating from another room and suspecting the presence of a nocturnal intruder, he leaves the study with his companions, passes through the bedroom, traverses the salon and reaches the dining room, noting as he goes various household appurtenances (a stove, the wallpaper, portraits, a staircase). Their quest comes to an end when behind the door of an armoire they discover a little old woman of "hideous" appearance, standing rigid, motionless and mute. Repeatedly they ask who she is and what she wants. No answer. Pushed by one of them, she topples to the floor "like some dead object." They prop her up, and the questioning continues. "As if deaf," however, the old woman remains silent. Finally she half opens one eye. Exasperated beyond endurance the hero shouts: "Ah! Enfin! Repondras-tu, vieille sorciere?" Still no answer. The eye closes. The dream ends when, coming to life, as it were, the old woman blows out the candle and the hero feels in the dark the sharp imprint of three teeth on his hand (236). Germann's nocturnal entry into the old Countess' room is of course by no means a replica of the scene just summarized. But the correspondences between the oneiric and the "real" episodes seem too many and precise to be coincidental. The midnight intruder, the prolonged passage from room to room, the various items retailed (kabinet, portrety, oboi, lestnica, pecka, spal'nja), a repellent and moribund old woman at the end of the quest, the futile, frustrating questioning, the old woman's imagined or apparent deafness, her abrupt fall to the floor as if dead, and the close similarity of the angry expostulation: "Staraja ved'ma! [...] tak ja z zastavlju tebja otvecat' " (VIII [1], 239-42)-taken together these correspondences leave small doubt that Puskin had been more impressed by Hugo's novella than his dismissive remarks suggest.4

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II Like the first of our parallels the second shows similarities which are largely concentrated in a single pregnant scene. Its main features may be summed up paradigmatically as follows. In love with a young woman of inferior social standing, the hero, a fledgling poet, whose verse efforts have recently been jeered by a hostile audience, abruptly finds himself prisoner of a band of outlaws headed by a lower-class demagogue, whose claims to royal status are transparently false. Surrounded by hostile captors and facing the gallows, he hears the rebel leader's ultimatum: join the forces of sedition or be hanged. After one attempted intervention fails, his life is spared when the beneficiary of an earlier act of his generosity intercedes. Set free, he is able to defend the honor of his would-be fiancee, who is also threatened by the outlaws. No reader of The Captain's Daughter will fail to recognize in this description Petr Grinev, army officer, wooer of the modestly circumstanced Masa Mironova, and novice poet (a "song" of his has recently been derided by Svabrin), who in Chapter VII falls into the hands of Pugacev's mutinous rabble. Standing before a gibbet, he is told that he must swear allegiance to the royal impostor or face execution. After Savelic's offer to die in his master's place has been ignored, Grinev's life is spared when Pugacev recognizes in him the benefactor of a few months before (the fur coat incident) and sets him free (VIII [1], 325). No longer a prisoner, he is able later on to protect his beloved Masa from the dishonorable designs of Svabrin. What makes this comparison more than an exercise in mere replication is the closeness with which the same paradigm fits another, earlier-and more famous-historical novel. For in Book II of Notre Dame de Paris we find another neophyte, frustrated poet (his verse has recently been heckled by a hostile audience), pursuing a beautiful girl of the lower classes (Esmeralda) through the city streets and intervening on her behalf when she is threatened with forceful abduction. Shortly thereafter he falls prisoner to a band of rabble (brigands, beggars, cripples, thieves) headed by a bogus King ("le Roi de Thunes" ). Standing before a "portable gibbet," and threatened with immediate execution, he is ordered to swear loyalty to the outlaws. After other possibilities of rescue have been exhausted, his life is spared when the person whom he had earlier sought to help (Esmeralda again) recognizes in him her would-be benefactor and successfully intercedes on his behalf (260-77). In view of these correspondences it is not perhaps surprising that, onomastically too, Puskin followed in the steps of the French novelist, "Petr Grinev" being little more than a Russianization of Pierre Gringoire, the name of Hugo's beleagured young poet.5

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III
Assuming that the likelihood of a genetic link connecting the two episodes has been shown, I would now like to move in the opposite direction, as it were, and call attention to a fundamental difference which marks the performance of the two "Peters." As Caryl Emerson has shown, Grinev's vicissitudes as, successively, benefactor, foe, captive and suspected ally of Pugacev (to say nothing of his obstacle-strewn courtship of Masa) may be seen to exemplify a rite of passage from callow, untested youth to proven, fully mature manhood (64-5). And here, too, his experience invites comparison with his French counterpart. For, as we have just seen, young Gringoire's mettle is also variously tested when his verse is publically derided, a helpless maiden is assaulted before his eyes, a pseudo-king commands his allegiance and, later on, he sues for the maiden's hand in marriage. However-and the divergence is as deep as its implications are intriguing-if in Puskin's tale of patriotism and valor Grinev consistently resists all temptations and overcomes all obstacles, Gringoire just as consistently does the exact opposite: his verse fiasco leaves him suicidally despondent; his attempted rescue of Esmeralda fails; terrified before the gibbet, he accedes to the "king's" demands; and when, later on, he presses his suit with Esmeralda, she declines, bluntly explaining that to become her husband "il faut etre homme [. . .] un homme qui pourra me proteger" (118). Plainly in her eyes Gringoire is not such a man. Puskin's procedure-conscious or other-is plain. Replicating the forms of the ordeal in question (the verse fiasco, the imperilled maiden, the threatening impostor, etc.) he reversed the directional signs on each. Nor was Notre Dame de Paris the only source which he used in this manner. In February, 1832, about six months after he read Hugo's novel, documents came into his hands which, Soviet scholarship has established, supplied him with the ur-protagonist for a historical novel about the Pugacev uprising (Makogonenko, 8). This was M. A. Svanic, dvorjanin, army officer, and participant in Catherine's campaign against the Cossack impostor, who, like Puskin's hero, fell into the enemy's hands and, like Grin6v, was ordered to acknowledge Pugacev as his sovereign. Here, however, the similarity ends. In contrast to his fictional counterpart Svanic swore allegiance to Pugcev and served him for some time before being taken prisoner, brought to trial, officially disgraced, and sent into permanent exile. The long and convoluted process by which the turncoat of history was replaced by the loyalist of fiction, and the heroic fission which resulted therefrom (the historical Svanic eventually became the odious Svabrin, rival of Grinev and traitor to the crown) has been traced more than once in detail and needs no reiteration here (Oksman, 149-85; Makogonenko, 620). The possible psychological implications of that transformation remain

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however to be explored. Why did Puskin, initially fascinated by the tensions inherent in a young officer's apostasy under pressure, change his plans? Why, rejecting both his literary model (Gringoire) and his historical source (Svanic), did he create instead the infallibly stalwart, intrepid, and virtuous Grinev? Why, in still other words, did he sacrifice psychological interest for political orthodoxy? To this question Soviet scholars have offered a simple answer. Fearful that tsarist censors would prohibit a novel whose hero is a gentry class renegade, Puskin purged his protagonist of all his seditious tendencies and transferred them to the despicable Svabrin (Oksman, 171).6 Plausible on the face of things, this theory is nonetheless open to one important objection. Is it likely that Puskin, who had consigned The Bronze Horseman to the "long drawer" rather than surrender to the demands of the censor, would radically change the design of an entire novel simply in order to meet possible objections from that same quarter? Unless we are to convict him of cynicism or cowardice, must we not suppose that some kind of inner assent was necessary for him to whitewash his protagonist so thoroughly? For want of specific evidence we cannot of course know the reasons behind this putative assent. And while the increasingly conservative political stance which some have ascribed to the poet during the years of the novel's gestation is a possible factor,7 a broader and more suggestive framework is provided by the public roles which Puskin was forced to play at that time. An overage kammerjunker, he had been thrust into the increasingly hostile milieu of the Imperial Court; a staunch patriot, his loyalty was suspected by a Tsar,8 whose own legitimist credentials were not wholly without taint;9 a nationally acclaimed poet, he was beginning to feel the barbs of ideologically hostile critics; a very macho husband, the persistent rumours of his wife's infidelity were deeply wounding. Under these circumstances is it surprising that the example of Pierre Gringoire-an ambitious young poet, whose verse is publically disparaged; an outsider who, thrust into a hostile milieu, must swear fealty to a pseudo-monarch; a lover, whose suit is spurned and whose virility is impugned-should have struck a sensitive chord in Puskin the writer and left, as we have seen, a mark on his art? Or-to push the argument one step further-is it surprising that, as if to exorcise his private demons, Puskin should, after several false starts, have written a success story in which the hero is a true-blue patriot who is exonerated of all charges of disloyalty, a suitor whose future wife staunchly resists all attempts against her honor, a loyal subject whose sovereign personally intercedes on his behalf, and a maligned poet whose verse is eventually appreciated by a distinguished audience.10 Thus (one conjectures) did Puskin's inner qualms collaborate with external pressures to remake the image of his soldier-hero.

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IV Although the two comparisons which have been my concern here might seem to have nothing in common save the authors which they share, this is not quite true. For, however different in concept and spirit Hugo's sprawling medieval epic is from his contemporary indictment of capital punishment, and however remote Puskin's Faustian story of black-magical dabbling may seem from his realistically conceived and carefully researched historical novel, the narrative skein of all four works may be seen to intersect at certain pivotal points. First, all four of our heroes are or become pariahs, outsiders, or misfits; second, at a crucial moment all four must in a drunken, festive or otherwise carnivalesque atmosphere face an alien or malevolent crowd;11 third, at some point each is tempted by or succumbs to a life of outlawry or crime; fourth, sooner or later each is incarcerated or taken prisoner; fifth, in a climactic confrontation each is threatened by-or threatens another with-violent death. In the first three of our heroes the ordeal "overcomes," as it were, the individual. In the last, as we have seen, Puskin, having jettisoned plans for a tale of pusillanimity, betrayal and (one assumes) eventual rehabilitation, hit on a scheme at once simpler and more in keeping with the didactic aim, which, somewhat surprisingly, was present in his mind almost from the beginning. In an "introduction," composed in 1833, but later excised, a patriarch (then Svanic, later Grinev) bequests to his grandson an account of his experience as a young officer, expressing the hope that his story will prove beneficial to the youth (VIII [2], 927). Exactly how the example of a craven renegade could have been "of use" to the narrator's grandson the surviving plot outlines do not make clear. Indeed the difficulties inherent in making the traitor of history the hero of an edifying tale may well have been (yet another) factor in Puskin's decision to change his narrative plans radically. Whatever the case, the implicit didacticism of the completed version and the largely youthful readership which Grinev's perilous ordeal has over the years attracted, indicates that the hope expressed in the suppressed introduction has in a sense been fulfilled. Whether that fatehabent sua fata libelli-would have pleased Puskin himself is another matter.

NOTES
1 Puskin found Les Orientales "brilliant"but "strained" (XI, 175) and strongly disapproved of Cromwell (XII, 138-41). Elsewhere he complained that Hugo's poetry in general had "no life, i.e., no truth" (XV, 29). For a short overview of Puskin's views on Hugo see Robert A. Maguire (106-7). 2 In a letter to V. A. Vjazesmskaja Puskin acknowledged "a great deal of talent" in the work, but placed it below the now-forgotten L'histoire d'un Ane by Jules Janin (XIV, 81). Elsewhere he is even more ambivalent, seeing in it both "fire and dirt" (XI, 94).

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Slavic and East European Journal L. P. Grossman has suggested that an anecdote about Cagliostro and his alleged ability to predict three winning lottery numbers may have supplied Puskin with the idea of the Countess' secret (Grossman, 68). Since we have no proof that Puskin knew of that anecdote (Cagliostro's name appears nowhere in his writings), Hugo's novella, which was still relatively fresh in his mind when he wrote "The Queen of Spades," plainly deserves priority. Other possible sources for the motif are noted by Debreczeny (215-6). In view of these correspondences one may surmise that the single, half-closed eye of Hugo's oneiric old woman ("elle a ouvert un oeil a demi") (236) may have inspired Germann's hallucinatory perception of the dead countess "winking [priscurivaja]a single eye" at him as she lies in state at the funeral (VII [1], 247). Iu. G. Oksman has plausibly argued (170) that the hero's last name derives from a historical personage, A. M. Grinev, an officer in Catherine's army, who, according to archival material available to Puskin, was suspected of treason, placed under arrest, and ultimately exonerated. But the two putative sources, the Russian and the French, far from being mutually exclusive, may well have reinforced each other. Thus, one may conjecture, the reason why Puskin ultimately hit on "Grinev" after several other names (Svanic, Basarin, Valuev, Bulanin) had been rejected, was precisely his memory of Hugo's hero-a hypothesis which is strengthened by the fact that, as a Christian name, he chose the Russian equivalent of Pierre, not, like Oksman's candidate, a name beginning with the letter "a." Makogonenko has offered an alternate explanation, namely, that the tsarist government's suppression of the "cholera uprisings" among the peasantry in the Novgorod area in 1831, taken in conjunction with Pugkin's own investigations of the Pugacev rebellion, had convinced him that the defeat of any peasant revolt was a historical necessity. He therefore had no choice but disassociate his positively conceived hero from this "senseless" undertaking (7-20). Though ingenious, this view of Pugkin as a kind of Marxist avant la lettre, who intuitively understood the necessity of a proletarian revolution, is not altogether convincing. For a perceptive discussion of Pugkin'spolitical views in the 1830's see Sam Driver (53-76). As is known, Pugkin, even as a kammerjunker, continued to be under police surveillance. To Pugkin's well-known antipathy for the Romanovs as upstarts and interlopers there is the fact, doubtless known to him, that Nicholas was in all likelihood not a "biological" Romanov at all, since the Emperor Paul was widely believed to be the son of Catherine's lover Saltykov. It also should be remembered that in December 1825 many Russians considered that Konstantin, not Nicholas, was the rightful heir to the throne. Further clouding the picture were the obscure circumstances of Alexander's reported death and the belief among some that he was not dead at all. Although the only poem of Grinev's which is reproduced in the novel is a decidedly weak performance and may well have been parodically conceived, his verse was, we are told, eventually to find favor in the eyes of none other than Sumarokov himself (VII [1], 300). The possibility that this was intended as a satirical barb directed at the fustian tastes of that overrated (in his time) poet cannot be excluded. In "The Queen of Spades" this occurs on the third night of Germann's "duel" with C(ekalinskij, when in a festive atmosphere an excited crowd gathers around the two contestants to witness Germann's downfall (VIII [1], 251). In Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne it is the jeering, howling Parisian rabble, who surround the condemned man as he is led to the guillotine (238-39).

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WORKS CITED
Debreczeny, Paul. The Other Pushkin: A Study of Alexander Pushkin's Prose Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

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Driver, Sam. Puskin: Literature and Social Ideas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Emerson, Caryl. "Grinev's Dream: The Captain's Daughter and a Father's Blessing." Slavic Review 40 (1981). Grossman, L. P. Ltjudy o Puskine. Moskva: L. D. Frenkel, 1923. Hugo, Victor. Romans I. Paris: Aux Editions du Seuil, 1961. Maguire, Robert A. "A. S. Pushkin: Notes on French Literature." American Slavic and East European Review 17 (1958): 101-109. Makogonenko, G. P. "Kapitanskaja docka" A. S. Puskina. Leningrad: Xudoiestvennaja literatura," 1977. Puskin, A. S. Polnoe sobranie socinenij. Moskva-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1937-59. Puskin, A. S. Kapitanskaja docka. Ed. Ju. G. Oksman. Moskva: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," 1964. Vinogradov, V. V. "Stil' 'Pikovoj damy.' "Puskin: Vremennik Puskinskoj kommissii 2 (1936): 74-147.