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ushkin is an extraordinary, perhaps unique, manifestation
of the Russian spirit, said Gogol. I will add "and
a prophetic manifestation." There is in his life, for
all us Russians, something incontestably prophetic... He
set down a very gallery of exquisite types drawn from the
Russian people. The exquisiteness is in their truth, their
positive and undeniable truth. You cannot deny them, they
stand as though in stone. I feel no duty upon me to clarify
my thought by a detailed and critical dissertation on these
works of Pushkin's genius. As well might one write an entire
book in the spirit of the old monkish chroniclers, to establish
the meaning of one of the noble figures unearthed by Pushkin,
and established for all time in exquisite beauty, as evidence
of that most potent spirit of Russia which can project types
of just such indubitable beauty. Such a type is herein set
forth, exists for all time beyond cavil, in reality not
in fancy. In that existence lives and flourishes the spirit
of his nation, vast, potent, and eternal. All the writing
of Pushkin affirms the spiritual force of Russia and the
Russian character; that character expressed in the eternal
lines:
In the hope of glory and good
I look ahead without fear.
All these gems of art and insight
remain as a landmark for Pushkin's successors, for the writers
of later days. It is not too much to say that without Pushkin
the gifted authors who succeeded him would never have transpired.
At best, despite all their gifts of expression, they would
have lacked the power and clarity from him derived. Without
him we should have lost, not literature alone, but much
of our irresistible force, our faith in our national individuality,
our belief in the people's powers, and most of all our belief
in our destiny.
...Pushkin revealed a miracle, a capacity
for universal sympathy unequaled even by the colossi of
Europe - Schiller, Cervantes, Shakespeare. By this capacity,
pre-eminently Russian, he marks himself our true national
poet. No poet of Europe could, equally with Pushkin, embody
in himself the genius and the hidden spirit of neighboring
peoples. European poets, on the contrary, were at one with
their own people and with no one else. Even in the case
of Shakespeare, his Italians remain almost always Englishmen.
The characters of Pushkin alone possess the individuality
of their nations. There are his "Miser Knight,"
his ballad "Once There Lived a Poor Knight," his
scenes from Faust... Read again his "Don Juan".
Without Pushkin's signature you might have supposed them
written by a Spaniard. How deep and strange is his fantasy
in the poem "A Feast in Time of Plague." But in
this fantasy you discover the genius of England; as in die
hero's marvelous song of the plague, and in Mary's song:
"Our children's voices in the noisy
school were heard..."
These songs are English; they express the longing of British
genius, its tears, its unhappy forecast of its future. Recall
the symbolical line:
"Once I wandered through the valley
wild."
These verses, with their sad, ecstatic
music are the key to the first pages of a mystical book,
written in prose by an old Englishman and sectarian. These
lines aren't solely a key, for they embody the very soul
of Northern Protestantism, of British doctrinal controversy,
and the slow-witted, dour mystic, with his spiritual dreams
and their impulsive power, and his determined but unbounded
aspirations. You hear in the sound of these verses the very
spirit of the times, of the Reformation. They bring home
the hostile fury of early Protestantism, and you understand
why Thought was swept by the times, walked through their
sectarian camps, sang their Psalms, wept with them in their
religious ecstasies, and joined in their belief. Compare
this religious mysticism with the religious verses from
the Koran or "Imitations from the Koran", and do we not find
a similarity to Mohammedanism in the very spirit of its
naive grandeur of faith and its appalling power? We find
also the ancient world; the "Egyptian Nights", where the gods
of earth sit, who ruled over their people like gods, despising
their aspirations and their genius. These gods, in isolation,
exerted their power, until they were overcome by madness
from their utter weariness of isolation and strove to drive
it off by Diverting themselves with inordinate brutalities,
the sensual fascination of creeping things, of a female
spider devouring its male.
Emphatically
I say, there never has been a poet like Pushkin, with his
universal sympathy, his extraordinary profundity, and the
miraculous reincarnation of his spirit in the spirit of
other nations - miraculous, because the gift has never been
repeated in any other poet in the world. This universality
is only in Pushkin; therefore, I repeat, he is a phenomenon,
a prophetic phenomenon, because he expressed in his poetry
the national spirit - the national spirit in its future
development, and the national spirit of our future, which,
already, has come to pass. For there is no power in the
spirit of Russian nationality, if not to aspire to universality,
and an all-embracing humanitarianism. No sooner had Pushkin
become a really national poet than he discovered the national
power, and in anticipating the great future of that power,
he was a true prophet, a real diviner.If he had lived longer,
he might, through the power of his genius, have been able
to immortalize the spirit of the Russian soul, bringing
it closer and making it more comprehensible to our European
family; perhaps succeeding in attracting them to us, more
than they are now, and enabling them to see the truth of
our hopes and desires - even giving them a better insight
into our natures, that they might learn to regard us with
less suspicion and with better understanding. Had Pushkin
lived longer, or had we been able to fathom his great secret,
we might find that among Russians, too, there would be less
strife and less misunderstanding. But God willed it otherwise,
and Pushkin, at the height of his career, died - and his
great secret was lost to posterity.
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