Taking
Chances: Speculations on Pushkin
--D. Venkat Rao
The Napoleonic
theme had a pervasive influence on the new art form of the 18th
century – the novel. The Bildungsroman itself was constituted by
the thematic of a young man from lower ranks of a largely state-oriented
society, ignited by ambition, surging forward to reach the heights of that
society. Literary historians argue that the 18th century in fact
institutionalized a newer concept of a youth as explorative and searching
principle. The genre of Bildungsroman itself is treated as an exemplary form
that embodies the experience of such a principle in concrete form. In the
process it is also seen as an exemplary source of making sense of and
reconciling with the turbulent and radically shifting world of everyday life. 1
In societies with
more or less commonly shared language and religion the Napoleonic theme may
have a compelling impact (especially when one understands this theme as a
possibility of mobility and access to resources and opportunities. But even in
such relatively homogenous societies the question of gender – who {i.e. which
gendered being} in particular has access to such resources – would complicate
the matter). Whereas in societies with diverse languages and social formations,
with heterogeneous cultural models, the Napoleonic principle may manifest in
unpredictable ways – or even may not have the pervasive impact it is said to
have on the other kind of societies. It would be fascinating to study the
development of modern cultural forms in their specific manifestations in
different cultural formations. But that’s too large a task to be broached on
this commemorative occasion (novelists like V.S.Naipaul have made some acute
observations in this regard on India).2 I wish to use this
opportunity to reflect on the work of the trapped genius – Alexander Pushkin,
to broach the larger theme outlined above. Instead of examining the entire
work, I wish to explore the theme I identified earlier in the context of a
specific work of Pushkin’s: “The Queen of Spades”.
Pushkin was born
into a Janus-faced Russia at an intensely contrapuntal phase of its existence.
Less than a century earlier Peter the Great had opened this medieval country to
the transforming Western Europe. There was a steady but significant flow of
newer literary intellectual trends from the venerated centers of enlightenment:
France, Germany and Italy.3 The Napoleonic motifs were very much a
part of the heritage. If this heritage projected a dynamic and West-ward
looking vision of Russia, in Western representations of the country, the other
face of it appeared autocratic, suspicious, dogmatic and inscrutable – in
short, Oriental. This dual heritage manifested in various guises, the most well-known
of which was Westernisers vs Slavophils. Russian intellectual history is
replete with casualties of these contrapuntal forces. The most famous endurers
of these warring elements, exemplars who confronted these elements with
indefatigable creative energies were Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and closer to us
Bakhtin.
There is a
remarkable resonance among these outstanding figures of Russia. Suspected of
sedition, Pushkin suffered six years of exile; condemned to capital punishment
but reprieved later by whimsicality of the Tsar, Dostoevsky survived trials and
tribulations. Alleged betrayer of the cause of the Revolution, Bakhtin was
abandoned to the Siberian exile and later condoned to lead a teacher’s life.
Extraordinary figures of a turbulent culture these three had shared interests.
Of all the Russian writers, Pushkin – the man who is said to have perfected
Russian language – had a decisive influence on Dostoevsky. 4 Pushkin
was not only the master of Russian idiom but also displayed spectacle of
carnival in his work. Dostoevsky infused the carnival spirit into his discourse
and played his notes in polyphonic compositions. Mikhail Bakhtin emerged as a
master theorist of the carnival.
The carnival theme
in essence implies taking chances, going against the well-known, defying the
normal. In life and work Pushkin exhibited such carnival spirit. At once close
to the power centre (he was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), to
the Court, he was also unbridled in his reckless defiance of the authority. It
was his ‘Ode to Liberty’ that earned him his six years of suffering and
lifelong censorship and surveillance. Tsar Nicholas himself acted as censor on
Pushkin’s work. “Not a single Russian author is,” wrote the frustrated Pushkin,
“more oppressed than I. Having been approved by the Emperor my writings are yet
stopped when they appear; they are printed with the censor’s wilful
corrections, while all my protestations are ignored…it was a devil’s trick to
let me be born with a soul and talent in Russia.” 5 This was six
years before his absurd death.
Irresistible,
deeply ambitious and adventurous, both in life and letters Pushkin desired for
the out of the ordinary. Natalia Goncharova was the most beautiful of the
empire. Even the Tsar admired her and to keep her in the Court recalled the
exiled poet to the Court and offered him a demeaning job. Restless but trapped
in the Court, not himself a handsome figure, Pushkin feels challenged when his
rather coquettish Natalia appeared to favour a well-endowed Dutch Count. In a
duel with the Dutch Pushkin receives a mortal blow and dies. Fearing public
outrage, the Tsar orders a clandestine funeral of the greatest poet of Russia. 6
A structural
homology to this rather carnivalesque life of Pushkin can be exemplified in the
remarkable story “The Queen of Spades.” The story is praised for its skillful
composition, its precise and unornamented prose, and its accuracy of detail.
The essential motif of the story is a carnival theme: gambling. Gambling, wrote
Bakhtin mediating of Dostoevsky, is by nature carnivalistic. This was clearly
recognized in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Symbols of
gambling were always part of the image system of carnival symbols. Gambling
undermines hierarchies. “The atmosphere of gambling,” continues Bakhtin, “is an
atmosphere of sudden and quick changes of fate, of instantaneous rises and
falls, that is, of crownings/decrownings. The stake is similar to a crisis:
a person feels himself on the threshold…”7
The story begins
with a scene of a card party of a group of military officers continuing into
the early hours of morning. The carnival game not only equalizes high and low,
but in this particular case, even made the ‘bleak weather’ of the ‘long winter
night’ pass unnoticed. At the beginning of the tale the protagonist, Herman the
German, is nowhere near the threshold. For he “[n]ever held a card in his
hands, never made a bet in his life, and yt he sits up till five in the morning
watching” his friends play.8 Herman is an ambitious, but self-disciplined
young man who values his independence. “Cards interest me very much”, he
declares rather pompously, “but I am not in a position to risk the necessary in
the hope of acquiring the superfluous.” 9 This rigidly calculative
nature might put him on the other side of the carnivalesque.
Yet the remarkable
achievement of this story is preciously in transferring this rule-bound,
dime-counting individual to the other pole of the chance-taking, crisis-seeking
punter. In this regard the very form of the story is carnivalesqe as it
overturns the equations of the beginning by the end of the tale. Pushkin
structures this overturning by bringing in another motif of carnival culture:
the motif of folk- tale: the secret about magic cards. As in a folk-tale Tomsky
functions as a trap-setter. In a carefully prolonged suspense – calculated to
arouse curiosity, Tomsky tells his friends that his grandmother Countess Anna
Fedotovna learnt a secret about punting while she was in distress for losing
half-a-million rubles in Paris. The countess, now an irascible old lady of 85,
no longer plays cards and does not reveal the secret to anyone. Tomsky’s lure
is set at the end of the first chapter.
If Tomsky is the
trap-setter, the countess is the witch with the secret that would enable the hero
to reach his most coveted goal. Predictably, Hermann falls into the trap –
although he hesitates initially – reaffirming his arithmetical self: “No”, he
says for a moment to the fantastic anecdote about the countess. “[E]conomy, moderation and hard work are my
three winning cards. With them I can treble my capital – increase it seven
folds and obtain for myself leisure and independence! 10 The
Napoleonic fire of ambition burns in him fervently. Yet the lure is stronger,
he succumbs to the temptation of the magic cards. He dreams of cards, a
gambling table with “stacks of bank-notes and piles of gold. He played card
after card, resolutely turning down the corners, winning all the time. He raked
in the gold and stuffed his pockets with bank-notes” 11. After
waking up, distressed by the evanescent wealth of the dream, he walks towards
the countess’ house “as though some supernatural force drew him there.” 12
What the countess
Fedotovna was to Hermann was the old pawnbroker to Raskolnikov – another youth fired
by the Napoleonic ambition: someone in the hero’s fervent race. Hermann
calculates very much like Raskolnikov though the former does not intend to kill
the countess. As in the folk-tale structure, Hermann finds a means – some kind
of a scapegoat to reach the holder of secrets. Lizaveta Ivanovna the orphaned
girl whom the countess brought up is someone “Everybody knew her and nobody
gave her any thought.”13 Her vulnerability makes her an easy
instrument for Hermann. This uncared for young woman dreams of a partner in
Hermann (that’s where a woman’s ambition appeared to end in the Bildung epoch).
Tomsky the trickster even tempts her toward Hermann. Totally innocent of
Hermann’s schemes, Lizaveta arranges to meet him in her room one night and
accordingly instructs him to get into the house in their absence. Hermann at
once fascinates and terrifies her.
Remorseless Hermann
hides in the house and confronts the countess when she’s alone and pleads with
her to reveal the secret about the cards. The stunned countess says it was a
joke and tries to dissuade him about the quest. The impatient overreacher pulls
out a pistol just to threaten the old lady. Horrified by the gun the countess
dies in a shock. Disappointed but without any concern for the longing Lizaveta
he goes to her and reveals the incident. The shattered LIzaveta recalls
Tomsky’s words: “he has the profile of a Napoleon and the soul of a
Mephistopheles. I think there must be at least three crimes on his conscience.”
14
Though cold-blooded
and ambition-driven, conscience gets Hermann. Relenting a little for the death
of the countess he goes to her funeral to beg her forgiveness. The visit begins
to have a strange impact on him. When he goes closer to the countess’ body the
old lady winks at him. Shocked by this uncanny event he misses a step and
collapses. That night after an untimely sleep Hermann wakes up to find someone
getting into his room. Once again it is the old countess (like the hacked
pawnbroker in Raskolnikov’s dream) walks up to him and reveals the secret of
punting but lays down conditions that he should play one card a day, never to
play after the third game and finally that he should marry Lizaveta.
Intrigued by the
fantastic, yet intact in his fervor of ambition Hermann goes to play cards with
a millionaire gambler. He wins the first day to the utter shock of his friends.
He doubles the stake the next day and surely wins again. The carnival game has
already pushed Hermann from his pompous resenting towards a blind/reckless
bidder of stakes. The cold calculative ascetic has been now completely trapped
by a faith in the fantastic. His belief has blinded him so much that on the
third day raising the stakes to an incredible triple punts an ace without even
noticing the card he has thrown. The millionaire gambler smilingly turns
Hermann’s eyes towards the card he has punted. And it is none other than the
queen of spades. As the gambler collects his booty(or fortune), Hermann, in his
last lucid moments notices the Queen of Spades winging at him. Hermann is later
confined to an asylum where he chants the sequence of deluding cards: three,
seven and ace.
Was Hermann’s
experience true or was it only a figment of his fantasy? Or is it a tragic
betrayal? Why did Hermann lose on the third day? Did the countess avenge
herself by cheating Hermann? Or is it because Hermann didn’t have a place for
the hapless Lizaveta in his mind that the old lady betrayed him? To try and
answer these questions is to operate within the limits set by the narrative. It
is the structure of the narrative – its very carnivalesque form – that turns
the expectations topsy-turvy. It turns the ascetic into a profligate and an
inveterate and congenital gambler like Tomsky into an inheritor of wealth
(Tomsky marries Princess Pauline). As a folk tale it may also convey a kind of
folk wisdom about the vagaries of fate – the incalculability of future (or what
is in store for us?), the caprice of chance.
But a more crucial
set of questions can be initiated both in the case of Pushkin and Dostoevsky.
Isn’t it intriguing that they should associate with or narrativize the
Napoleonic motif – of ambitious exploration – in the format of a ‘wisdom tale’?
That they should treat this as a culpable prototype? Or is it because that the
prototype cherished and celebrated in European cultural expression – as the
supreme declaration of bourgeois-human emancipation – cannot be circulated as a
universal legal tender? Is this what these extraordinary writers, Pushkin of
Hermann and Dostoevsky of Raskolnikov, intimating us with? That the
Bildungsroman (as an exemplary genre) of European experience can be maintained
only at a cost of several exclusions – the diverse particularities of a gender
and race? That such reconciliations of the Bildung can no longer be treated as
unproblematic (who has access to resources – which is able to move upward?) Can
we venture further and risk the last question? That even the devastation of the
more recent Soviet experiment in the so called ‘real socialism’16 is
nothing but a visceral expulsion of a prolonged and belated enactment of the
Napoleonic theme on the turbulent terrain of Russia?
Note and
References:
1.
Franco Moretti, The Way
of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, (London: Verso, 1987)
pp. 3-74.
2.
V.S.Naipaul, An Area of
Darkness, (1964; Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1968) pp. 212-217; and India:
A Wounded Civilization, (1977: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp.
37-54.
3.
Caryl Emerson,
“Pushkin, Literary Criticism and Creativity in Closed Places”, New Literary
History, Vol 29, 1998. Pp. 653-655.
4.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Translated by Caryl Emerson,) Manchester,
University of Minnesota Press,1984) pp. 159, 167.
5.
From Pushkin’s 1831 letter
to his wife quoted by Rosemary Edmonds in her translator’s introduction to The
Queen of Spades and Other Stories, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962),
p.8 (This edition has been used in the rest of the text.
6.
Rosemary Edmonds, op cit,
p. 8.
7.
Bakhtin, op.cit. p. 171
(Italics original).
8.
Pushkin, “The Queen of
Spades”, op. cit. p.153.
9.
Ibid. p. 153
10.
Ibid. p. 163
11.
Ibid. p. 164
12.
Ibid. p. 164
13.
Ibid. p. 161
14.
Ibid. p. 173
15.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of
Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994) pp 163-265 for a recent critique of post-Soviet scenario
of capitalism and the state.
