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शनिवार, 22 मार्च 2014

Taking Chances: Speculations on Pushkin

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.

         
         

           

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