Sidestepping Silence, Ventriloquizing Death: A Reconsideration of Pushkin’s Stone Island Cycle[1]

Alyssa Dinega Gillespie

Writing poetry… is an exercise in dying…
Art is not a better, but an alternative existence…
It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.

—Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

During the summer of 1836, beset by financial worries and political and domestic pressures, as well as by ominous premonitions of his own early death,[2] Pushkin stayed with his wife and their four children at a dacha on Kamennyi Ostrov (Stone Island) near St. Petersburg. Here he planned and wrote the poems of a cycle that was not to be published in his lifetime. The scholar N. V. Izmailov was the first to discuss the composition of this so-called Stone Island cycle in two articles published in the 1950s.[3] In the years since the publication of Izmailov’s articles, several scholars have offered fascinating analyses of the correspondences and contrasts between the six poems that are most commonly thought to make up the Stone Island cycle. Most notably, in 1982 V. P. Stark first discussed the Easter theme that pervades three of the cycle’s poems; Sergei Davydov, in his own inspired articles on this topic published during the 1990s, has termed this Christian mini-cycle an “Easter Triptych.”[4]

The topic of Pushkin and Christianity has received particular attention since the demise of the Soviet Union and the Soviet doctrine of official atheism. In recent years, Russian scholars such as V. S. Nepomniashchii, G. A. Lesskis, Sergei Davydov, and Irina Surat have grappled with this issue, founding their arguments upon reminiscences of Pushkin by his contemporaries and extrapolating from the poet’s own writings in both poetry and prose (personal letters, diary entries, critical essays).[5] All these scholars, to varying degrees, have cast Pushkin as a poet who had repented his youthful blasphemous ways and evolved toward genuine Orthodox belief by the time of his death, though all also preface their findings by certain caveats: when considering the beliefs of a poet, it is important not to confuse the biographical with the aesthetic; for Pushkin, religious feelings were an avowedly private matter; Pushkin was first and foremost a poet, and the question of religion can only be examined through his poetry.[6] Davydov and Surat are the most cautious in their conclusions. Surat speculates that the “divine Providence” (sviatoe providen′e) Pushkin worshipped in his late poems “merges with the poetic gift whose call Pushkin had always heeded—the poetic gift that was itself his fate, bestowed upon him from heaven”; while Davydov finds that Pushkin, for all of his preoccupation with religious texts and ideas in later years, never became a thoroughly “Christian poet,” but instead remained poised in a “half-pagan, half-Christian obeisance to beauty and creation, both human and divine.”[7]

Indeed, beauty and creation, not theology, are always foremost in Pushkin’s mind.[8] Yet the content of the Stone Island cycle’s “Easter Triptych” is indisputably, explicitly Christian, even liturgical. How should we reconcile these two circumstances, particularly since Pushkin’s “conversion” to sincere Christianity is supposed to have happened during that very time period when the Stone Island cycle was composed? Truly, it is tempting to view the cycle as the key to understanding Pushkin’s attitude toward Christianity at the end of his life—a private meditation, almost a prayer, written in a sincere, uncomplicated idiom, that amounts to the articulation of a “universal human ethical ideal…[that] was precisely a Christian one including as its core the notion of the Messiah who will be condemned and crucified, only to emerge victorious after death.”[9] In general, though, we know that, however straightforward Pushkin’s works appear, in reality they are rarely if ever simple. We know, too, that high poetry is an entirely different genre from prayer, though the poet may toy with similarities between the two. For these reasons, it strikes us as ridiculous, for example, to read into Pushkin’s poem “Monastyr′ na Kazbeke” (“Monastery on Mt. Kazbek,” 1829) the explicit dream of ending his days in a monastery or to understand the late lyric “Pora, moi drug, pora!” (“It’s time, my friend, it’s time!,” 1834) as a blueprint for Pushkin’s plan to abandon his wife and children for the Pskov cave monastery.[10] The fact that the Christian elements of the Stone Island cycle are quite explicitly present should not be allowed to overwhelm our general scholarly wariness of superimposing the theological sphere onto the literary/aesthetic sphere in our interpretations.[11]

I would therefore like to propose a reading of the Stone Island cycle that moves beyond the cycle’s explicit Christian thematics to explore its poetics more broadly, illuminating, in the process, Pushkin’s ideas about poetic creativity and himself as a poet during the last months of his life. In the course of this analysis, I will argue that the Stone Island cycle does not, in fact, attest to the poet’s belated conversion to sincerely Christian humility, as several scholars have supposed.[12] Instead, I will suggest that the cycle traces Pushkin’s somewhat regretful distancing of himself from such a stance, in favor of his reaffirmation of the fulfillment of poetic inspiration experienced in freedom and isolation and his new acceptance of a frankly untranscendent death.

Textological and Theoretical Background

In order to arrive at this interpretation, we must first consider a long-standing textological riddle: what is the most likely structure and composition of the Stone Island cycle itself? Most scholars have thought that the cycle is made up of six poems, all written between June and August of 1836. The manuscripts of four of the poems bear notations that apparently designate their position in the cycle: “Ottsy pustynniki i zheny neporochny” (“Hermit fathers and immaculate women”) is number II, “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” (“Imitation of the Italian”) number III, “Mirskaia vlast′” (“Secular Power”) number IV, and “Iz Pindemonti” (“From Pindemonte”) number VI. This designation leaves the first and fifth slots open. Izmailov was the first to theorize that the two missing poems are “Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi” (“I raised a monument to myself not built by hands”) as number I, and “Kogda za gorodom, zadumchiv, ia brozhu” (“When beyond the city I wander deep in thought”) as number V.[13] Izmailov’s hypothesis has been accepted as plausible by some scholars, amended by others. Most interesting among these amendations for my purpose is Sergei Fomichev’s theory that what has previously been read as a Roman numeral VI on the clean manuscript copy of “Iz Pindemonti” is, in fact, the number sign (#) followed by the numeral 1; the reproduction of the manuscript in Fomichev’s book reveals his interpretation to be convincing.[14] Both Fomichev and Davydov, as well as Gerald Mikkelson, have argued as a result that “Iz Pindemonti” was in fact intended by Pushkin to be the opening poem of the Stone Island cycle. “Pamiatnik” is then thought to occupy the sixth position, becoming the cycle’s finale.[15]

Before delving any further into the question of which poems Pushkin intended to comprise the Stone Island cycle, in what order, it is necessary to define the lyric cycle itself as a literary phenomenon. Very little work has been done on the theory and generic identity of the lyric cycle within any literary tradition.[16] In the Russian context, the opening chapters of David Sloane’s Aleksandr Blok and the Dynamics of the Lyric Cycle (1987) remain the best discussion of these problems. Sloane begins by presenting two possible definitions of the lyric cycle, one of which he terms “inclusive,” and the other “restrictive.”[17] Sloane himself embraces the inclusive definition “but reserves the concept of internal unity advanced in the restrictive definitions as an evaluative criterion.”[18] He then goes on to illustrate the ways in which separate poems in a successful lyric cycle interact both intertextually and contextually, thereby generating tensions and ambiguities that “[induce] the reader to establish categories of comparability (equivalency) between the member poems in an effort to ascertain the semiotic system that unifies them.”[19] That system may consist of both formal and thematic “equivalencies” between the constituent poems—equivalencies that may not at first be apparent, but which are “forefronted” during the process of interpretation. Significantly, the example Sloane chooses to illustrate these principles is none other than Pushkin’s Stone Island cycle; after “forefronting” a number of recurrent binary motifs in the cycle such as genuine art/false art, accessibility/inaccessibility, authority/submission, he concludes, impressively: “One is unlikely to find in all of Russian poetry a lyric cycle that surpasses the genius of this hypothetical grouping.”[20] In this light, it is interesting to contemplate L. K. Dolgopolov’s claim that no true lyric cycles existed in Russian poetry until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (!).[21]

Sloane’s idea that certain formal and thematic elements of individual poems are “forefronted” in the context of their interaction in a cycle as a whole—and that this “forefronting” may not be immediately evident but may require a great deal of work and creativity on the part of the interpreter to discover—informs my own analytic method in the present study. However, this interpretive approach presupposes the existence of a known cycle text. In the case of the Stone Island cycle, we have no such definitive text. Nor are the interpretive guidelines Sloane lays out sufficient to help us decide this cycle’s contents and composition in the absence of infallible manuscript evidence—despite the suggestive reading Sloane offers of it—since interpretations of various broader, hypothetically possible (though unlikely) configurations of the cycle would still yield a richly satisfying network of contextual meanings.[22]

A brief contemplation of two such hypothetical configurations can clarify this point. Many scholars have noted numerous parallels in both theme and language between Pushkin’s 1826 poem “Prorok” (“The Prophet”) and certain lyrics associated with the Stone Island cycle, especially “Ottsy pustynniki,” “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” and “Pamiatnik.”[23] Yet no one would take seriously the possibility that Pushkin intended to include “Prorok,” which was written a full ten years earlier, in the Stone Island cycle. On the other hand, if we consider poems in chronological proximity to the four known Stone Island poems that also display the kind of multilayered thematic and formal overlap Sloane deems characteristic of the cycle form, we discover not only the two works usually appended to the cycle, “Pamiatnik” and “Kogda za gorodom,” but a further two that Toddes holds to be related, “Strannik” (“The Wanderer,” 1835) and “Naprasno ia begu k sionskim vysotam” (“In vain I flee to the summits of Zion,” 1836), in addition to the 1834 lyric “Pora, moi drug, pora!”[24] All five of these additional poems were written in the period 1834–36; all of them take as their primary meter alexandrine verse, as do the known Stone Island poems;[25] all of them overlap thematically with the known poems (for instance, all nine poems share the motifs of weariness, the desire for escape, and spiritual yearning). Clearly, one could trace in detail a suggestive complex of parallels and ambiguous resonances among all these poems, similar to the splendid readings of the narrower six-poem version of the cycle offered by Davydov, Sloane, and Mikkelson. Such an interpretation would more than satisfy Sloane’s criteria for a successful lyric cycle. Yet, once again, it seems unlikely that Pushkin in fact intended the cycle to have such a broad and untidy reach.

What is needed, then, is some criterion beyond the presence of thematic and formal similarities—beyond a discernible system of semiotic echoes and meaningful contexts—that can help us to surmise, as accurately as possible, which poems Pushkin truly intended to include in his cycle, and which ones are simply part of the wider context of his poetic thought during the last years of his life. I would like to propose that the key to solving this tantalizing riddle lies in recognizing what I shall call the “architectonics” of the cycle. By “architectonics,” I mean the precise way in which poetic “building blocks” such as the recurrent themes, motifs, morphemes, metrical figures, binary oppositions, and so on that other scholars have traced among various poems of the Stone Island cycle come together to create a dynamic, shapely “edifice” when the cycle is contemplated as a unified whole.[26]

In other words, I propose that the Stone Island cycle be considered not as a compilation of somewhat overlapping but separate texts, nor as a chronological sequence (even one with biblical underpinnings) that can conceivably be diminished or expanded at will,[27] but as an integral poetic work unto itself. In this regard, we know from Soviet scholar Dmitrii Blagoi the consistent importance for Pushkin of symmetry in poetic composition:

The most wonderful characteristic of Pushkin’s artistic mastery consists not only in the fact that his creations are—with regard to their elegance, harmoniousness, the symmetry of their parts, the wise and truly classical simplicity of the whole—unique exemplars of literary architecture. The compositional structure of each of Pushkin’s artistic works is usually also deeply meaningful and corresponds perfectly to the artistic idea or intention that forms its foundation.[28]

From Pushkin’s earliest lyrics to his late prose masterpieces, symmetry—often subtle or hidden, but always detectable—forms the ideational skeleton (or one might say more aptly, drawing upon Pushkin’s own metaphor from an earlier poem, the supporting tripod [trenozhnik]) of Pushkin’s poetic method.[29] Therefore, in order for us to develop the most accurate understanding possible of how the Stone Island cycle is put together and what it means, it is imperative to consider the architectonics of the cycle viewed as a whole. An examination of the work’s overarching symmetries will have the added advantage of allowing us to venture beyond the static focus of structuralist poetics to explore the cycle as a dynamic poetic event unfolding in time, with all the subtle transformations and evolutions of thought that process entails.

If we construct the cycle according to either Variant 1 (Izmailov’s version) or Variant 2 (Fomichev’s version), there is no discernible symmetry—surprisingly, given Fomichev’s own emphasis on the architectonic perfection of Pushkin’s lyric cycles.[30] The Easter Triptych (poems II through IV of six), is off-center, and the two last poems of the cycle, whichever they might be, imbalance the opening lyric. With this imbalance in mind, I put forth my own hypothesis that Izmailov and others are correct in placing “Kogda za gorodom” as the fifth poem of the cycle, that Fomichev and Davydov are correct in reading Pushkin’s manuscript notation as “#1” rather than “VI” and therefore in placing “Iz Pindemonti” at the opening of the cycle—but that “Pamiatnik” is not, in fact, a part of the cycle at all, though it is closely related (we will return to the question of “Pamiatnik” later on).[31] Indeed, the only reason for supposing that Pushkin intended the cycle to consist of a total of six poems is that “Iz Pindemonti” has been thought to be number VI; if that poem is renumbered as I, then it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that the cycle consists of only five poems in all. If we construct the Stone Island cycle in this way, omitting “Pamiatnik” entirely, the Easter Triptych is then evenly flanked by one lyric on either side.[32] In my opinion, the cycle thus constituted seems most characteristically Pushkinian—in the sense that it is most symmetric, most unified, and most abundantly meaningful, as I shall now demonstrate.

I begin with some general observations about the new version I am proposing. The five poems that make up this Stone Island cycle are all written in the same form: Russian alexandrines, or iambic hexameter with a caesura after the first hemistich, in rhyming couplets alternating masculine and feminine endings. The poems are free-flowing and range in length from 10 to 28 lines, the shortest being the cycle’s middle poem, “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” which itself has a circular thematic development. There are no stanzaic boundaries in any of the lyrics, although the second and fourth poems (“Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′”) consist of three thematic sections each, whereas the first and last poems of the cycle (“Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom”) are parsed into two separate movements by the staggering of a poetic line, resulting in the division of a lengthy preamble from a shorter concluding segment. Even these preliminary remarks make the architectonic symmetries of the cycle quite clear. In my forthcoming analysis, therefore, I shall discuss the poems of the cycle according to their symmetric pairings, beginning on the outer periphery with poems I and V, continuing inward with poems II and IV (which constitute the outer boundary of the central Easter triptych), and concluding with a discussion of the perplexing central lyric “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu.”[33]

The Outer Periphery: Wandering into Silence (“Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom”)

The truncated lines and ellipses which end both framing poems of the Stone Island cycle are reminiscent of the expansive endings of Pushkin’s most famous meditations on the workings of poetic inspiration, such as the “shirokoshumnye dubrovy” (broadly rustling forests) of the programmatic 1827 lyric “Poet” (“The Poet”) and the musing question “Kuda zh nam plyt′…?” (Whither should we set sail…?) that concludes the fabulous 1833 “Osen′ (Otryvok)” (“Autumn [A Fragment]”):[34]

—Вот счастье! вот права...

—That's happiness! Those are rights...

(“Iz Pindemonti”)

Стоит широко дуб над важными гробами
Колеблясь и шумя...

An oak stands broadly above the solemn graves
Bending and rustling...

(“Kogda za gorodom”)

True, these two endings are not identical in form; the fragmentary final line of “Iz Pindemonti” comes as an emphatic, though wistful afterthought after a completed rhyming couplet, while the fragment that ends “Kogda za gorodom” is not a discrete syntactic unit but trails off into silence before the poem’s final thought—or its final rhyme—can be completed.[35] Still, the two culminating half-lines resonantly echo one another in both form and substance and form a clear bridge between the cycle’s first and last poems, while also linking them with key Pushkinian texts on the nature of the poetic calling. These two lyrics, taken together, thus constitute a personal poetic retrospective that spans the Easter Triptych and serves as our first clue that the Stone Island cycle is ultimately not so much about Pushkin’s relationship with Christ and Christianity as it is about the poet’s inspirational predicament in the harsh climate of 1830s Nikolaevan Russia.

Indeed, in light of the Christian interpretation the Stone Island cycle has been given in the recent scholarship, its two framing poems have caused critics the most difficulty, as neither contains overt religious references. In my view, this inconsistency should not be smoothed over, but rather should suggest that a straightforward interpretation of the cycle as a text of Christian conversion is, ultimately, insufficient. Just as Kahn demonstrates that Pushkin in “Strannik” utilizes the poem’s narrative framework to ironize the wanderer’s perspective, thereby distancing himself from the persona’s religious vision,[36] so too in the Stone Island cycle, the two framing poems similarly serve to diminish the immediacy of the Christian perspectives explored in the cycle’s central triptych. Moreover, just as “Strannik”—which diverges significantly from its literary subtext, the first book of John Bunyan’s allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress—is not an authentic text of religious conversion but, in Kahn’s terms, a “reading of allegory and allegory of reading,” so too the framing poems of the Stone Island cycle raise questions about the nature of reading and writing and draw attention to the poet’s ineluctable alienation from human society. These metapoetic issues then form the context for the central triptych, insinuating a certain distance between the explicitly religious subject matter of the triptych poems and the poet’s perspective on that subject matter.

It is no accident that “Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom” exhibit fundamental similarities to “Strannik.” After all, both of these lyrics are, in essence, poems of wandering: in “Iz Pindemonti,” the poet longs for freedom of both motion and conscience (“ne gnut′ ni sovesti, ni pomyslov, ni shei; / Po prikhoti svoei skitat′sia zdes′ i tam” [not to bend either my conscience, or my thoughts, or my neck; to wander hither and thither according to my whim]), while in “Kogda za gorodom” the theme of wandering emerges already in the opening line (“Kogda za gorodom, zadumchiv, ia brozhu” [When beyond the city I wander deep in thought]) and leads the poet away from the city environs, to the peace of his ancestral village.[37] Of course there is a strong autobiographical subtext here; at the time these poems were written, Pushkin wanted desperately to be allowed to retire with his family from the fuss and scandal of the imperial capital to his country estate (which he was attempting to purchase at the time, following his mother’s death the previous spring)—a wish that was to be denied him. Yet the wanderlust expressed so poignantly in “Iz Pindemonti” is also generalized from the outset, since the poet rejects equally both the power structures of the tsarist regime (along with any efforts to rebel against them) and the civil rights and freedoms of western European democracies.[38] Clearly Pushkin has taken pains to distinguish this poem from his youthful liberal verse: he is expressing his rejection of the possibility of citizenship in any political system and, by extension, in any human society.

Indeed, although the poem is framed by the word prava (rights)—which ends both its first and last lines as well as a line positioned nearly at the poem’s center—it is not, really, about politics at all. For the centrally placed prava is rhymed with an appropriation of Hamlet’s intriguing and mysterious line “slova, slova, slova” (words, words, words), and there’s the rub. Disillusioned now with public existence of any kind—including literary—Pushkin professes to regret the presence in Russia of a “keen censorship” (chutkaia tsenzura) and the absence of a free press no more than he does the civil freedoms he has been denied throughout his life. He therefore construes his quotation from Hamlet in such a way as to seem to dismiss, simultaneously, not only the “loud rights” (gromkie prava) he has just catalogued indifferently but also the value of language itself as a human pursuit. This apparent repudiation of “words, words, words” is a peculiar act on the part of a poet and begs closer scrutiny.[39]

In fact, the particular context in which Hamlet delivers his famous line in Act II, scene ii of Shakespeare’s tragedy provides some valuable clues both about what Pushkin has in mind here and about the meaning of the Stone Island cycle as a whole. For Hamlet’s line comes in response to Polonius’s question as to what he is reading; Hamlet, playing the madman, answers the question accurately yet evasively. By naming words as such as the object of his attention, he denies Polonius any entry into their specific meanings—or, to use the terms of structuralist linguistics, he harps upon the signifier, thereby barring access to the signified and, in essence, denying the signifier its significance. This clever avoidance preserves Hamlet’s privacy from the intrusive meddling of the ruling powers (and their toadies) and imitates madness even as it remains true to objective fact; as Polonius remarks, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t… a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.”[40]

I would argue that Pushkin reading Hamlet reading in “Iz Pindemonti” exercises a similar pretense of “reasoned madness” when he appears to dismiss the significance of “words, words, words”—i.e., poems—in favor of a wish to reclaim his privacy and wander freely, undisturbed by the powers that be.[41] For, he professes to dream of rededicating himself to a semblance of merely receptive—as opposed to creative—“ecstasies of deep emotion” (vostorgi umilen′ia) before the beauties of nature and the arts. Moreover, the “arts” to which he refers are implicitly not the literary, verbal arts—which he has made a show of publicly renouncing—but the visual arts.[42] Yet Pushkin is anything but a naïve reader. Hamlet’s clever recasting of what he reads at Polonius’s expense (the lines that begin “Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards…”[43]) clearly demonstrates that what imitates merely receptive (even insane) behavior may, in actual fact, be quite actively and consciously willed, pointedly reconstrued, and, yes, creative. Evidently, the private nature of reading and the issue of authentic versus imitative behavior that shape Hamlet’s shrewd utterances are very much at stake, too, in Pushkin’s poem.

We may go still further and suggest that in “Iz Pindemonti” Pushkin also has Hamlet’s subsequent comment in mind: when Polonius, by way of expressing concern for Hamlet’s well-being, asks him “Will you walk out of the air, my lord?” Hamlet answers punningly, but with dead accuracy, “Into my grave.”[44] Indeed, Boris Gasparov and Irina Paperno note that in Pushkin’s works, the motif of umilenie is a variant of the related motifs of madness and inspiration; that all three of these motifs are related to the motif of escape (pobeg) and are in turn components of the theme of “eternity.”[45] Thus, For Pushkin in “Iz Pindemonti,” escape into the world of private ecstasy (umilenie), of Edenic freedom and beauty, is evidently tantamount to death, since such a state is incompatible with every imaginable human society. The poem’s wistful final line—“Vot schast′e! vot prava…” (That’s happiness! those are rights…)—which reads like a coda or commentary on the poet’s fantasy, harks back to the earlier and closely related poem “Pora, moi drug, pora!” where the poet likewise dreams of an escape (pobeg) into an impossible realm of private labors and pure pleasures even as he recognizes the nearness of death and the absence of happiness on earth: “Na svete schast′ia net, no est′ pokoi i volia” (There is no happiness in this world, but there is peace and free will). This line may be understood to refer to the inner peace (pokoi) that the poet gains from his refusal to sacrifice his independence of will (volia), though he knows he sacrifices personal happiness (schast′e) and even his own life in the process. The opposition of peace and free will to personal happiness is a key concept throughout Pushkin’s works and is especially important to an understanding of the Stone Island cycle; construing svoboda (freedom) only in the sense of “Christian freedom” (meaning salvation through Christ) is reductive and fails to take account of the rich connotations of the motif of freedom within Pushkin’s oeuvre.[46]

We need not read the Stone Island cycle anachronistically (backwards from Pushkin’s own death the following winter) in order to understand the predominance in it of such grim musings: the idea of self-sacrifice—and perhaps even an impotent, Hamletesque desire for revenge—was evidently very much on the poet’s mind during the summer of 1836, which marked the tenth anniversary of the hangings of five of the Decembrists (13 July 1826) and the exile of the others (including Pushkin’s lyceum comrade Vil′gel′m Kiukhel′beker, with whom the poet continued to correspond, and whose sentence had been commuted to a lighter one by imperial order in December 1835; we shall return to Kiukhel′beker later). The reference to “bending one’s neck” in “Iz Pindemonti” may, in fact, connote the hangman’s noose and thus constitute a veiled reminiscence of these events; following this logic, Pushkin’s refusal to bend his own neck is ambiguous, suggesting not only his proud refusal to be subdued but also perhaps his feeling of residual guilt at having survived the ill-starred poetic and political comrades of his youth and, simultaneously, the futility of their idealistic self-sacrifice.

The theme of rights and freedoms in “Iz Pindemonti” likewise calls to mind Pushkin’s work during this period on an article about Aleksandr Radishchev, which he intended for publication in the third issue of his journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary); the article was subsequently refused by the censor. Radishchev, whose name was unpublishable in Pushkin’s time, had been sentenced to death in a mock trial, then (after his sentence was commuted by the empress) exiled to Siberia for his enlightened views on the injustices of Russian society; he committed suicide shortly after his return to St. Petersburg. Capital punishment, self-sacrifice, vengeance, and suicide thus all provide the somber backdrop for the fundamental questions that haunt the Stone Island cycle: How can the poet continue to be a poet, if he cannot be granted personal freedom, if his personal dignity is squelched? How can he continue writing poetry, how can he define his identity as a poet, how can he even go on living in a climate perceived as intensely hostile to the most fundamental principles of his being?

To sum up, then, in “Iz Pindemonti” Pushkin, well aware of the external forces amassing to crush both him and his poetry, introduces a complex cluster of intertwined motifs that shapes the meanings of the entire Stone Island cycle: his punning embrace of silence, apparent renunciation of verbal art and subversive imitation of madness/creative ecstasy serve the poet’s wish to maintain his privacy and escape from his established public persona and from human society generally into a pristine world of beauty, while the fantastical nature of this escape conjures up the specter of self-sacrifice and violent death.

In light of these issues, it is significant that the title of “Iz Pindemonti”—which constitutes the very first words of the Stone Island cycle—immediately serves to position Pushkin in the cycle as a gifted reader rather than an original writer. Reading, as we have seen in the context of “Iz Pindemonti” and its Shakespearean subtext, provides a creative “escape hatch” for the poet; when writing as a “reader,” he is able to wander amidst the words of others, pretending silence, and achieving a measure of freedom that would otherwise be unavailable. True, the title of “Iz Pindemonti” is thought to be largely a mystification, designed to mislead the censor, and no known source for this poem in the Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte’s work has been discovered; Tomashevskii notes, though, that Pushkin’s appraisal of Pindemonte apparently accorded with that given by J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi in his De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe:

The loss of his friend and the illness he considered to be fatal showed him the insignificance of life. He broke his ties with everything personal, and turned his affections to the pleasures of nature, agricultural life and solitude… Many of Pindemonti’s [sic] verses are connected with those of Gray.[47]

This affinity of Pindemonte for Thomas Gray emphasizes the symmetry I allege between “Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom,” since the latter poem is based upon Gray’s “Elegy on a Country Churchyard,” which, in Vasilii’s Zhukovskii’s translation (titled “Sel′skoe kladbishche” [A Country Graveyard]), was extremely popular in Russia and provided the model of the Russian elegy for generations.[48]

The poems of the Easter triptych are likewise constituted under the cover of literary subtexts. The cycle’s second poem, “Ottsy pustynniki,” incorporates the prayer of St. Ephraem the Syrian from the Russian Orthodox liturgy almost verbatim; the third and middle poem, “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” is a reworking of a sonnet about Judas’s betrayal of Christ by the Italian improvisatore Francesco Gianni as translated into French by Antoni Deschamps; and the fourth poem, “Mirskaia vlast′,” retells the story of the Crucifixion from the Gospels.[49] In this way, Pushkin cleverly situates each of the poems of the Stone Island cycle—arguably one of his most personal works—upon a preexisting text, or chuzhoe slovo: words, words, words whose origins, external to the poet himself, provide a measure of privacy and protection. This strategy demonstrates that not only did Pushkin in his late lyrics “ventriloquize the other… imagin[ing] his voice into another body, taking on its characteristics and perspective” as Powelstock so convincingly argues,[50] but that he also did the opposite: ventriloquizing himself as if from a great distance; gauging his own creative and spiritual profile against the thoughts and words of others; defining his most private, inner self through its secret encounters with foreign texts, foreign modes of thinking and being, and ultimately with the most foreign state of all—nonexistence or death.

“Kogda za gorodom, ” of all the Stone Island poems, is the poem most explicitly about death. Yet its structural parallels with “Iz Pindemonti” suggest that it is also about poetry and the yearning of a poet trapped in an inhospitable environment. Both “Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom” juxtapose the aesthetics and ambitions of the secular, urban, and political world to the poet’s preference for nature, peace, and privacy; in both poems, a staggered line of verse divides these two worlds—and the two sections of the poem to which they, respectively, correspond—from one another. In a reprise of his rejection of civil rights in the cycle’s opening lyric, in “Kogda za gorodom” the poet rejects the crude aesthetics of a crowded St. Petersburg cemetery, its publicity, its jumble and lack of aesthetic taste, and, simultaneously, the tombstone inscriptions “i v proze i v stikhakh” (in both prose and verse) that record the earthly deeds and glory of the urban dead. He does not wish to be remembered this way; he finds such inscriptions distasteful and banale, to the point that contemplating them makes him physically ill. He elects instead of noisy posthumous renown the “solemn peace” (torzhestvennyi pokoi) of the country churchyard where, the previous spring, he had buried his mother and purchased a plot for himself. He prefers an unadorned grave, privacy, mystery, and quiet serenity. This election of silence (tishina) and peace (pokoi) over the renown of prose and verse inscriptions is reminiscent of his rejection of “words, words, words” in favor of “different rights” and a “different freedom” in the earlier poem.

“Kogda za gorodom” shares few of the characteristics of its Romantic subtext, a meditative elegy. The mood of Zhukovskii’s “Sel′skoe kladbishche” is sentimental, lugubrious, and exaggerated throughout; vocabulary such as “chuvstvitel′nyi” [sensitive], “priskorbnyi” [pitiable], “melankholiia” [melancholy], and “sleza” [tear] predominates, while the theme of death as the “great leveller” in the first part of the elegy soon gives way to the embedded narrative of a mysterious stranger, a poet, who habitually visits the graveyard, burdened by an unknown sorrow, before himself dying prematurely (his maudlin epitaph comprises the final three stanzas of the poem). This unfortunate young poet’s story is then passed on by an elderly peasant (selianin) to Zhukovskii’s foraging narrator. Pushkin’s lyric has none of these features. There is no such mysterious stranger; the mature poet himself, now consigned to poetic silence, takes the young wanderer’s place. Pushkin’s peasant (selianin) passes by—whether in the present or in the future is unclear—without speaking to anyone (though he sighs and says a prayer) or even, apparently, recognizing the poet’s presence at all. There is, indeed, no story in Pushkin’s poem; only a setting, a mood, a story’s ending. Moreover, Pushkin’s repulsive urban cemetery (wholly absent from the Zhukovskii poem) serves as a foil to the country cemetery and thus offsets the sentimentality of Zhukovskii’s treatment of the theme of death. In fact, “Kogda za gorodom” escapes sentimentality entirely; Pushkin’s attitude toward death in its opening section is one of disgust intermingled with grotesque irony, whereas the last portion of the poem accords the country graveyard a realistic setting, tranquil and uplifting, in which the poet quietly accepts his own impending death, whenever it should come.[51]

Powelstock’s acute observation that the final clause of the first section of “Kogda za gorodom” (“Takie smutnye mne mysli vse navodit, / Chto zloe na menia unynie nakhodit. / Khot′ pliunut′ da bezhat′…” [Everything urges such morose thoughts upon me that I sink into bitter despair. I’d like to spit and flee…]) reads like “an earthy lampoon of elegiac sentiment” is well taken.[52] Indeed, the temperamental and stylistic differences between Pushkin’s poem and Zhukovskii’s are so striking that one wonders whether an additional subtext is at work here too, functioning as a polemical vehicle for Pushkin’s commentary on the elegiac conventions typical not only of “Sel′skoe kladbishche” but of his own earlier elegiac poetry as well: namely, the famous graveyard scene of Hamlet (Act V, scene i). The baroque sentiment of Hamlet’s banter with the gravediggers in Shakespeare’s play, simultaneously morbid and mocking—a commentary on both the brevity and the pointlessness of human life—is similar to Pushkin’s tone in the first part of “Kogda za gorodom”: Pushkin’s rotting corpses crowded together in a swamp (boloto), his merchants, bureaucrats, and old cuckolds housed in slimy graves (mogily slizkie) yawning (zevaiuchi) for new dead are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s courtier now kept by Lady Worm whose “bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with them” and the purported lawyer “[knocked] about the sconce with a dirty shovel,” not to mention, of course, the court jester Yorick who is now reduced to a garish skull.[53] In Hamlet, as in “Kogda za gorodom,” there is a sudden and dramatic shift away from this mood of macabre comedy in the second part of the scene, when Hamlet realizes that Ophelia has committed suicide and is being carried to her burial. Here we once again discover a broader context for Pushkin’s cycle that incorporates motifs of self-sacrifice, suicide, vengeance, and guilt.

Two points of evidence support the presence of the additional Hamlet subtext in “Kogda za gorodom.” Firstly, the structural symmetries between “Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom,” and the architectonic symmetries of the Stone Island cycle as a whole, suggest that the two poems may likely share a key subtext. Secondly, Pushkin had already made use of the graveyard scene of Hamlet in a very similar thematic context toward the end of the second chapter of Evgenii Onegin.[54] Significantly, the emotion that governs the Hamletesque Lenskii in Evgenii Onegin, as it does Pushkin himself in “Kogda za gorodom,” is unynie (despair); according to the poet and critic Viacheslav Ivanov, unynie—despair, implying loss of faith in God—was Pushkin’s “main enemy, the fiercest of his demons”; Davydov associates this mortal sin with motifs of “superfluity, futility, aimlessness, emptiness, monotony” and notes that the poet never fully overcame its temptation.[55] The polar opposite of unynie in Pushkin’s personal lexicon—umilenie (deep emotion)—is key, as we have already seen, to the poet’s escape fantasy in the conclusion of “Iz Pindemonti.” Umilenie, I would argue, is likewise key to what Davydov terms Pushkin’s “aesthetic teleology,” his personal belief in the possibility of an alternative “salvation through art.”[56] By the end of the Stone Island cycle, Pushkin has abandoned his hope for umilenie and can only retreat from crushing, debilitating unynie (whose demonic origin is made clear in the poet’s superstitious urge to “spit and flee”) into a contemplation of the release offered by death and oblivion.

Indeed, there is no suggestion of life eternal in this poem; death is a return to nature, nothing more. Nature speaks to Pushkin through a rustling oak tree that spreads its branches above the graves, and he listens and is silent: “Stoit shiroko dub nad vazhnymi grobami, / Koleblias′ i shumia…” (An oak stands broadly above the solemn graves, bending and rustling…). Despite the similarity of this elliptical final line to the “shirokoshumnye dubrovy” (broadly rustling forests) of “Poet,” at the end of “Kogda za gorodom” there is no suggestion of pregnant potentiality, no indication that the poet is overcome by an inspirational fervor that will lead to the composition of further poems, and no completed rhyme. Instead, the abortive ellipsis implies the poet’s willing silence, his relinquishment of his body to the silent earth and his voice to the speaking oak. This is Pushkin’s discovery by the end of “Kogda za gorodom” and hence of the Stone Island cycle as a whole: that nature is the consummate poet, that nature will continue speaking for him when he is gone, giving the lie to tyranny, constraint, and falsehood of all kinds. At the cycle’s outset he strategically relinquished his public persona, avoiding trouble by presenting himself as sensitive receiver rather than an active poetic originator. Now, at its conclusion, he resigns himself sincerely to the finality of death and even welcomes its coming. Death, understood as decisive and untranscendent oblivion—a surrendering of poetic voice to nature’s greater eloquence—thus answers the poet’s wish for happiness and creative freedom expressed so plangently in the cycle’s opening poem, even as the soothing, ancient oak symbolically supplants his earlier Edenic dreams. In this way, at the end of the Stone Island cycle, death is revealed as the surprising inspirational aim and source of the cycle as a whole; needless to say, this fact argues against an interpretation of this cycle as a narrative of Christian salvation.

The Outer Flank of the Easter Triptych: Imitating the Sacred (“Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′”)

In “Iz Pindemonti” and “Kogda za gorodom,” we have witnessed the poet trying on various masks (in the guise of literary subtexts), including the deathmask, as a means of imitating silence in order to escape the public eye. In both “Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′,” the figure of a suffering Christ—or his proxies, the humble men and women who emulate him—takes center stage, displacing guilt-ridden, dissembling, hesitant, doomed Hamlet who lurks behind the cycle’s outermost lyrics. The question we must now address is how these Christian figures are to be interpreted in the context of the broader cycle. In other words, we are obliged to consider the possibility that the poet appropriates the Christian subtexts of “Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′,” just as he does the name of Pindemonte or the texts of Gray, Zhukovskii, and Shakespeare, for literary rather than religious purposes. Here is the chief question: does Pushkin in the Easter triptych poems continue to exploit the boundaries between imitation and authenticity, passive reception and active creation, private thought and public semblance? More simply put: is Pushkin in “Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′” a naïve reader and sincere consumer of religious text, or a sophisticated and inventive pretender?[57]

The answer should already be apparent in the highly crafted, highly complex structure of the two poems and their markedly symmetrical relation to one another. Both poems consist of three thematic sections of unequal length. In “Ottsy pustynniki,” the poet first introduces, in a general, narrative way, the “hermit fathers and immaculate women” who composed the prayers that make up the Orthodox liturgy; then narrows his focus to a single prayer (by St. Ephraem the Syrian) that especially moves him; and finally incorporates the prayer itself into his poem with minor alterations. Thus, the poem moves from a general to a more specific focus, at the culmination of which lies the poet’s appropriation of a religious text. “Mirskaia vlast′,” too, moves forward and inward from a great historical distance: it begins with a retelling of Christ’s crucifixion based upon the New Testament account; then lurches forward suddenly to the present moment, in which the shroud of Christ in St. Petersburg’s Kazanskii cathedral is flanked on Good Friday by two threatening armed sentries;[58] and finally ends with the poet’s angry, highly sarcastic invective against the blindness, hubris, stupidity, and injustice of the ruling authorities.

A careful reading of “Mirskaia vlast′” reveals that this closing tirade is ambiguous in its address; it may refer equally to the Russian authorities of Pushkin’s own time or to the Roman authorities who condemned Jesus to death and carried out their sentence so cruelly. Such blurring is accomplished in part through the application of specifically Russian Imperial vocabulary and jargon to the Christian context: for instance, Christ is described as “tsar′ tsarei” (czar of czars) and the crucifix as “kazennaia poklazha” (official cargo). This overlay of references creates a kind of palimpsest that has the effect of generalizing the message of the poem: just as the poet in “Iz Pindemonti” wants to flee not only the political machine of his own place and time but all organized human society, so too the poet in “Mirskaia vlast′” makes use of the biblical archetype of the Crucifixion to condemn implicitly all systems of authoritarian rule over the free human mind and spirit. More specifically, if the Russian context is conflated with that of the New Testament, then Pushkin’s Russian sentries also recall their sadistic Roman counterparts of apocryphal legend, who gave Jesus vinegar-soaked sponges to suck as he expired. The influence of apocryphal legend on “Mirskaia vlast′” is likewise felt in the presence of only two women alongside the cross—Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary (“Mariia-greshnitsa i presviataia deva” [Mary the sinner and the Holy Virgin])—by contrast with the three Marys mentioned in the Gospels (John XIX: 25). Davydov claims that Pushkin made this change for the sake of symmetry, suggesting that poetic concerns override theological ones in the poet’s construction of his subject throughout.[59] Consequently, Pushkin manipulates the Gospel account freely in his retelling, admitting apocryphal sources alongside the canonical ones and boldly—even recklessly—merging commentary on his own milieu with contemplation of the most solemn event in Christian history.

This merger of sources and contexts indicates Pushkin’s interest in investigating the relevance of Christ’s behavioral example to his own situation. In fact, according to Lotman, what interested Pushkin most in the Gospels was “death, in essence voluntarily chosen and simultaneously sacrificial…the psychological motivation, ethical foundation for self-sacrifice.”[60] Lotman therefore links Pushkin’s earlier intentions to write a drama about Jesus (never realized) with his interest in the story of Cleopatra, which resulted in his fragmentary 1835 Egipetskie nochi (Egyptian Nights). Egipetskie nochi, like the Stone Island cycle, addresses themes of inspiration, madness, and creative freedom; the poet-narrator of this work, like Pushkin in his lyric cycle, longs to escape the constraints of public adoration; and the work’s finale equates a young man’s willingness to give his life for a single night of lovemaking with the Egyptian queen with the poet’s willingness to sacrifice his life to his poetic calling. Lotman’s observations on Pushkin’s understanding of the “Jesus subject” provide the key to understanding “Mirskaia vlast′.” Indeed, in this lyric Jesus’s fate epitomizes the intertwined conundrum of capital punishment and the mandate for self-sacrifice whose troubling attraction for Pushkin we have observed already in the framing poems of the Stone Island cycle. Here as there, too, the shadows of the Decembrists lurk: in the audible echo of “execution” (kazn′) with “official cargo” (kazennaia poklazha)—terms that conjure up the twin fates of the condemned, hanging or transport to Siberia—and in the presence of Christ’s faithful Marys at the foot of the cross, anticipating the Decembrist wives who would follow their husbands into exile (Pushkin’s use of the archaic term zheny [wives] to mean “women” emphasizes this parallel).

Trying on the mask now of submissive Jesus rather than vengeful Hamlet, Pushkin in “Mirskaia vlast′” must once again contemplate his options: once again, he must grapple with the constraints of his stifling notoriety as a poet and the specter of violent death. His unexpected frankness in the final section of the poem can therefore be understood as a calculated experiment in courting death, as the poet thrusts his unbending neck forward into the limelight of the martyr’s halo, fearlessly firing indignant question after question at the authorities. His bold association of himself with Christ is indicated through the implicit parallels between the authorities’ harsh and uncomprehending treatment of them both, as well as by the subtle choice of vocabulary such as tsar′ (czar) and chern′ (the mob) to indicate Christ’s isolation and inaccessibility; these words have characterized Pushkin’s prior poetic meditations on his own alienation from society.[61] Yet Pushkin’s imitation of Jesus in “Mirskaia vlast′” is also a revision; unlike Christ, “predavshii poslushno plot′ svoiu / Bicham muchitelei” (who obediently offered his flesh to the tormentors’ lashes), Pushkin’s poet is anything but obedient and docile in this poem. Rebellious and outspoken, he implicitly repudiates the Christian ideal of meekness and humility. Therefore, his adaptation of the Gospel text represents, ultimately, an appropriation rather than an emulation. Despite the parallels he draws between the powers that condemned Jesus to death and those that, in a sort of perverted echo of history, persecute the poet now, it is evident that Pushkin’s choices are different from Jesus’s: he chooses personal dignity and freedom of expression (cleverly ventriloquized through one cultural figure or another) over obedience, though such a choice perhaps means that he foregoes Christianity’s promise of life eternal. Indeed, as we have already seen, in the very next poem he will willingly exchange the promise of the “zhivotvoriashchee drevo” (life-giving tree) of “Mirskaia vlast′”—i.e., the crucifix—for the oblivion of the graveyard oak.

Returning now to “Ottsy pustynniki,” we can observe that the rewritten prayer that ends that poem is structurally parallel to the spirited closing tirade of “Mirskaia vlast′,” in which, as we have seen, Pushkin appropriates the Crucifixion for his own ideological purposes. This fact alone should alert the reader that the subtle changes the poet introduces into St. Ephraem’s text produce something quite other than a faithful paraphrase of the prayer. Nevertheless, the majority of scholars to date have insisted on reading “Ottsy pustynniki” as a sincere text of Christian yearning. For example, despite Davydov’s very useful, detailed summary of Pushkin’s changes to the original prayer, he still claims that these changes “are genuinely liturgical and as such do not present a major distortion of the prayer,” and, furthermore, that “[the incorporation of the prayer of St. Ephraem] into his own poem is Pushkin’s way of paying homage to the spiritual and poetic gifts of the church father. Pushkin reproduced the prayer almost verbatim and without quotation marks. By doing so, the poet subscribed to the ancient principle of sacred writing where imitatio rather than innovatio is the ideal.”[62] In my view, these comments go to the heart of the standard critical misconception of the Stone Island cycle as a whole, for they fail to take account of the larger framework developed in the cycle’s non-Christian framing poems. Indeed, Pushkin’s ventriloquism is extremely skillful, and it is no wonder that, in the absence of a broader frame of reference, his imitation of Christian humility in “Ottsy pustynniki” comes off convincingly as humble mimicry rather than the ingenius innovation that it is.

In order to demonstrate the validity of the new interpretation I am proposing, I shall discuss first this poem’s extratextual context, and then its contents and intertextual context within the cycle. Fomichev, Davydov, and Mikkelson, among others, hold that Pushkin’s prose writings on Christian subjects, published in Sovremennik during the last year of his life, demonstrate the poet’s religious awakening; his article “Ob obiazannostiakh cheloveka: Sochinenie Sil′vio Pelliko” (“On the Duties of Man: A Work by Silvio Pellico”) in particular is held to be the key to understanding “Ottsy pustynniki” and the entire Stone Island cycle.[63] Undeniably, Pushkin was deeply interested in, even attracted to, Christianity during this period. Yet his praise of the “divine eloquence” of the Gospels does not necessarily prevent him from regarding biblical text as a literary text like any other, available to the poet’s probing intellect; nor does his respect for Christ’s “meekness of spirit, sweetness of eloquence and infant-like simplicity of heart”[64] necessarily mean that he himself aspired to attain these same qualities (indeed, we have already seen in “Mirskaia vlast′” that he rejects them). Moreover, what Pushkin wrote in prose, for publication in his own journal—a financial and publicity venture that he desperately needed to succeed—may not have reflected his own private beliefs to the same degree as the searching lyrics of the Stone Island cycle, which he presumably wrote for himself alone and never attempted to publish.

Fomichev discovers a compelling link between Pushkin’s article on Pellico and the ten-year anniversary of the sentencing of the Decembrists;[65] yet I would propose a different way of interpreting the significance of the article for the Stone Island cycle. Pellico, an Italian poet and playwright ten years Pushkin’s senior, had been condemned to death in 1822 for his publication of the short-lived literary journal Il Consiliatore. This journal was seen as having been friendly to the Carbonari, a secret political association whose attempt to reform the Italian government in 1820 was crushed by King Ferdinand I with the assistance of the emperor of Russia among other international powers. Many of the Carbonari were executed, but Pellico’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment; he was released early, in 1830, and dedicated his writings for the remainder of his life to religious rather than political themes. Thus, Pellico’s history indeed calls to mind that of the literary Decembrists, especially Kiukhel′beker, who (as Fomichev notes) “found religion” during his time in prison and had recently been released from exile. At the same time, the fact that Pellico had been punished for his publication of a literary journal must have captured Pushkin’s attention during this period of his own involvement with Sovremennik.

This complex web of associations suggests that we should interpret Pushkin’s words of respect for Pellico’s pious writings on several levels simultaneously. Pellico’s history must have resonated with Pushkin’s feelings of vulnerability, reminded him again of the Decembrists’ self-sacrifice and his own escape from their fate, and urged upon him the question that apparently very much occupied his thoughts during this period: whether it was possible, by creating the clever appearance of compliance with social and political norms (via the mimicry of silence or the adoption of publicly sanctioned points of view—chiefly, the point of view of Orthodox Christianity), still to maintain freedom of poetic expression. Indeed, Pushkin may have envied personalities such as Kiukhel′beker and Pellico (not to mention Jesus) who avoided the temptation of bitter resentment even in adversity, or he may have wondered cynically whether the devout thoughts of such men were not, to a degree at least, calculated to avoid offense. He may even have speculated that St. Ephraem himself, perhaps, composed his prayer out of just such practical considerations (i.e., under just such duress)—for the saint’s biography is reminiscent of those of both Kiukhel′beker and Pellico, as well as of Pushkin himself: “In youth he was reckless and hot-tempered, but having been thrown into prison by accident for stealing sheep, he came to his senses, became worthy of hearing the voice of God, and humbled himself.”[66]

Pushkin’s attitude toward St. Ephraem’s prayer had been, at least earlier in his life, far less than reverent: he had parodied it in a 23 March 1821 letter to the poet Anton Del′vig (“I wish [Kiukhel′beker] in Paris the spirit of chastity, in the chancellery of Naryshkin the spirit of humility and patience; I am not worried about the spirit of love, he will not be lacking in that; I say nothing of the tendency to idle words—a far-off friend cannot be too talkative”[67]), and the conclusion of his infamous Gavriiliada, written the same year, likewise contains a spoof of the same prayer: “Daryi ty mne bespechnost′ i smiren′e, / Daryi ty mne terpen′e vnov′ i vnov′, / Spokoinyi son, v supruge uveren′e, / V semeistve mir i k blizhnemu liubov′!” (Grant me safety and humility, grant me patience again and again, pleasant dreams, trust in my spouse, peace in my family and love for my fellow man!). Considering this parodical context, Pushkin’s departures from his liturgical source in “Ottsy pustynniki”—for example, his omission of the submissive phrase “mi rabu Tvoemu” (to me Thy servant); his placement of the prayer for chastity (tselomudrie) after the prayer for love; and his precise wording of that final prayer (“tselomudriia mne v serdtse ozhivi” [revive chastity in my heart] suggests that, at present, this aspiration is defunct)—seem pointed, subtly rebellious, and not at all insignificant. Indeed, these changes bespeak Pushkin’s preservation of his characteristic playful irreverence and, thus, of his personal pride, so very antithetical to the spirit of St. Ephraem’s humble prayer.[68]

In fact, it may be useful to read “Ottsy pustynniki” not as a sincere religious document but as an experiment in poetic self-camouflage inspired by the examples of Pellico, Kiukhel′beker, and St. Ephraem himself. Even as Pushkin—the roaming hermit of the preceding “Iz Pindemonti”—pretends to identify with the “hermit father” who composed the prayer, beautiful as it is, there are subtle indications that it does not produce in him the humility necessary for a Christian rebirth, for a release into paradisaical “oblasti zaochny” (realms unseen). Instead, the prayer serves as a vehicle for the poet’s contemplation of the hardships and challenges of his own (earthly, poetic) path.[69] Thus, the phrase “dukh prazdnosti unyloi” (the spirit of despairing idleness) is reminiscent of the poet’s pre-inspirational laziness in “Poet” and simultaneously anticipates the despair (unynie) that will beset him in “Kogda za gorodom”; while his abstention from “prazdnoslovie” (vain speech) recalls both the “iazyk/ I prazdnoslovnyi i lukavyi” (tongue prone to vain and slanderous speech) of his prophet-to-be in “Prorok” and his disillusioned renunciation of “words, words, words” in “Iz Pindemonti.” Moreover, his addition of the image of a “hidden serpent of ambition” (liubonachalie, zmeia sokrytaia) evokes biblical temptation in the form of the Tree of Knowledge and resonates ironically with both the Edenic fantasies of the cycle’s framing poems and the life-giving cross and reference to Christ’s redemption of “all Adam’s descendents” (ves′ rod Adamov) in “Mirskaia vlast′.”

Finally, the verb Pushkin chooses in “Ottsy pustynniki” to describe the composition of such humble Christian prayers as St. Ephraem’s—“slozhit′” (to compose)—holds great significance. For this verb implies the compilation of already existing materials, by contrast, presumably, with the poet’s generative, original, and prideful activity of “tvorenie” (creation) (the verb “tvorit′” [to create] is expunged from the Stone Island cycle). Phonetically, “slozhit′” is uncomfortably close to the verb “sluzhit′” (to serve) from “Iz Pindemonti.” Even as Pushkin pretends to follow St. Ephraem’s literary example, he hints that this style of verbal composition is alien to his own sensibilities. Much as he respects and is moved by Christian humility, he is constitutionally incapable of embracing it himself, perceiving it as a kind of spiritual servitude.[70] Implicitly, then, he must also forego transcendence, contenting himself instead with the transport of poetic inspiration here on earth, “sred′ dol′nikh bur′ i bitv” (amidst earthly storms and struggles).

The Crux of the Cycle: Contemplating Temptation and Responsibility (“Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu”)

We have seen that at the two far edges of the Stone Island cycle are poems that reject public existence and publicly audible speech in favor of privacy, silence, and peace; while in the second and fourth positions are poems that express Pushkin’s simultaneous reverence for Christianity and reluctance to make himself over in Christ’s image—he prefers to maintain his pride and independence even at the possible cost of his own salvation. This overview indicates that the architectural design of the Stone Island cycle is best thought of as cruciform rather than either linear (as interpretations that foreground the Christian calendar suggest) or circular. Thus, we can think of the two pairs of poems already discussed as two separate axes of the cycle: poems I and V consider the problem of public vs. private identity from a secular point of view and span the emotional distance between umilenie and unynie, fantasy and oblivion; whereas poems II and IV consider the same problem from a religious point of view, ranging in response from humility to anger, submission to resistance. All four of the cycle’s outer lyrics contemplate death and position the poet as a reader, an imitator, or a ventriloquist as a means to self-preservation of sorts.

The seething core lyric of the Stone Island cycle, “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” which retells the story of Judas’s suicide and entry into hell following his betrayal of Christ, constitutes the intersection of the cycle’s two separate axes—the point at which all its varied moods and ideas converge. Here, secular and spiritual allegiances and motivations overlap, in a turbulent admixture of despair and love, pride and humiliation. Judas, who doubles as disciple (uchenik) and traitor (predatel′), is reminiscent of Pushkin’s ventriloquistic role-playing in other poems of the Stone Island cycle. Moreover, the dead Judas of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu”—who has elected the gallows tree (drevo) over the oak of oblivion or the life-giving cross—represents the most pointed reminiscence of the hanged Decembrists who haunt the cycle throughout: for, as Boris Gasparov notes, the fact that the rope on which he has hanged himself breaks in the poem’s opening line (“Kak s dreva sorvalsia predatel′ uchenik…” [When the traitorous apostle broke away from the tree…]) calls to mind horrifying rumors that surrounded the Decembrists’ execution.[71] Thus, it is appropriate that the poem focuses on Judas’s suicide and its aftermath, rather than on any earlier part of his history; Judas’s fate concentrates and intensifies the cycle’s motifs of self-sacrifice, capital punishment, violent death, and suicide from which the other four poems emerge. At the same time, Judas’s afterlife in hell counterbalances both the Christian transcendence of poems II and IV, and the prospect of untranscendent oblivion in poems I and V.

Beyond all these thematic convergences, however, there is an even more important reason why Pushkin placed precisely this perplexing, disturbing poem at the heart of the Stone Island cycle. A clue to this reason is given in the poem’s title. Throughout the cycle, as we have already seen, the theme of imitation underlies Pushkin’s investigation of his poetic options in the context of a hostile social establishment. Imitation of Christ, imitation of the Church fathers, might remove him from political suspicion or at least allow him to experience his political persecution as a welcome spiritual purification. Nevertheless, he shows himself to be incapable of pure mimicry in the very substance of the cycle’s poems—all of which are founded upon multiple foreign texts, yet all of which become, through his act of creative appropriation, fundamentally his own, intrinsically “Pushkinian.” Like Judas, he chooses predatel′stvo (betrayal) of his source over its echo, Christ’s obedient predanie (devotion) in “Mirskaia vlast′.” Indeed, the cycle as a whole can be read as an extended, sophisticated meditation on the advantages and dangers of the creative strategy of imitation, which promises both protective camouflage and expressive freedom. Yet the title of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” is the one and only instance in the cycle where imitation is explicitly named. This naming indicates that “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” serves as the focal point of the cycle’s metapoetic concerns.

The second word of the poem’s title is likewise significant, for it draws attention to the lyric’s original source in a sonnet by the Italian improvisatore Francesco Gianni. This authorship, in turn, serves to link the two-faced Judas in “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu”—and his impersonator, the poet Pushkin—to the compelling but repulsive figure of the Italian improvisatore in Pushkin’s fragmentary Egipetskie nochi and the compromise between virtuosity and parasitism he represents: he receives his poetic themes from the public on assignment, yet he realizes them freely and beautifully; he has an elevated, true poetic gift, yet he is also a public performer who calculates his monetary profits with unabashed greed. Here is how the narrator of Egipetskie nochi, the Russian poet Charskii, characterizes the improvisatore′s imitative ability: “Amazing… Another’s thought hardly touches your ear and it has already become your own property, as if you had borne it with you, cherished and nurtured it unendingly.” These words could characterize equally well Pushkin’s own poetic achievement in the Stone Island cycle. The question implicit in “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” then, is whether, in adopting this self-protective poetic mode, Pushkin betrays the higher aspirations of his art.

Indeed, Judas in “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” is presented as a creative figure, and his kiss, articulated like the ultimate in seditious verse, is presented as a creative act. For his traitorous lips (“usta…lobzavshie Khrista” [lips…which had kissed Christ]) recall both the lips with which Pushkin has just finished intoning his ambivalent prayer in “Ottsy pustynniki” (“Vsekh chashche mne ona prikhodit na usta…” [More often than any other it comes to my lips…]) and the tortured lips of the prophetic poet of “Prorok” (“I on k ustam moim prinik, / I vyrval greshnyi moi iazyk, / I prazdnoslovnyi i lukavyi, / I zhalo mudryia zmei / V usta zamershie moi / Vlozhil desnitseiu krovavoi” [And he bent down to my lips, and tore out my sinful tongue, prone to vain and slanderous speech, and between my frozen lips the stinger of a wise serpent he placed with his bloody right hand]). Like the poet Pushkin in the flanking poems of the Easter triptych, Judas shows himself to be a brilliant appropriator, for he dares to borrow Christ’s quintessential gesture of love (the kiss) for his own personal purposes. Judas’s kiss, in turn, prompts Satan’s response: a punishing kiss reminiscent both of Judas’s original crime and of the scorching linguistic powers of Pushkin’s prophet, who goes forth at the end of the poem to “burn the hearts of people” (glagolom zhech′ serdtsa liudei) with his potent Word. Satan, the superior being (he is termed, audaciously, vladyka [lord]—the same term used in reference to Jesus in both “Ottsy pustynniki” and “Mirskaia vlast′”), copies Judas’s act and, simultaneously, the acts of Pushkin’s prophet. Satan’s retribution can thus be interpreted as a statement of artistic inheritance, as Judas the uchenik or follower (and Pushkin, his ambitious double) steps into the role of originator. Judas’s kiss interpreted in this way stands for the temptation of poetic hubris: the poet’s urge to protest against God’s world as it is, and to recreate it in his own image.

There is also another way of interpreting Satan’s punishment of Judas in “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu.” When Satan kisses Judas back at the end of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” he completes a dazzling syntactical loop (“Satana…lobzaniem svoim naskvoz′ prozheg usta, / V predatel′skuiu noch′ lobzavshie Khrista” [Satan…with his own kiss burnt the lips through that on the night of betrayal had kissed Christ]). With these words, recompense for past sins is reconfigured as poetic necessity, and the circle of the poem—from betrayal to retribution for betrayal—closes. The implication is that Judas freely chooses, even creates, his own punishment for deviating so subversively from his original “source” and “king,” Christ (Khristos: fittingly, the last word of the poem). Pushkin’s contemplation of Judas’s torment, suicide, and punishment demonstrates his own deep sense of responsibility for his heretical poetic appropriation of sacred themes and texts: he makes his artistic choices consciously and freely, fully aware of their implications and consequences.

This reading of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” as a testament to poetic responsibility strongly echoes the fragment “Naprasno ia begu”—a chilling description of the poet’s inability to outrun temptation and responsibility for his sins, which hunt him through his desert wanderings like a lion hungry for fresh blood.[72] Toddes provides a very convincing discussion of the many parallels between the imagery and language of “Naprasno ia begu” and those of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu”; yet he interprets these links as serving the personification of evil.[73] In my view, these parallels demonstrate quite clearly Pushkin’s preoccupation in the Stone Island cycle not with absolute moral questions, but with questions of poetic responsibility, the ethics of the poetic calling. “What business does the poet have with good deeds and vice? Only their poetic aspect is important,” Pushkin once wrote.[74] “Naprasno ia begu,” which chronicles the poet’s attempted escape—his flight to the wild heights of Zion—and the tortures that ensue, echoes the prophet’s flight into the wilderness and excruciating resurrection in “Prorok” no less than does “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu,” which narrates Judas’s suicidal plunge into hell and hideous revivification, culminating in artistic triumph, as he is marked with the searing brand of the poet-prophet.[75] For Judas in “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” as for Pushkin in “Naprasno ia begu,” there is no escape.

Thus, we see that there are two possible ways in which Judas can be viewed in the central lyric of the Stone Island cycle. On the one hand, he is a traitor and speculator who “sells out” to the secular authorities; on the other hand, he is the artist of his own fate who accepts full responsibility for his deeds. This ambiguity lies at the heart of Pushkin’s cycle and of Pushkin’s interrogation of his own poetic actions; it also captures his ambivalent discomfort and guilty admiration of the Decembrists’ self-sacrifice (Hamletesque or Christlike? blundering or virtuosic?), in which he himself did not share. The nagging question implicit throughout the Stone Island cycle is whether, given the limitations of Pushkin’s current situation, his strategy of ambitious imitation is a valid and honorable mode of poetic self-expression—a legitimate means of veiled protest—or the equivalent of surrender to the powers that be, the damning equivalent of complicity, obedience, betrayal?

Beyond Stone Island: Oblivion and the Poetic Afterlife (The Case of “Pamiatnik”)

In an enthusiastic review (published anonymously in Sovremennik in 1836) of a volume of poems by Viktor Tepliakov, Pushkin muses thus on the young poet’s imitation of Byron:

Talent is unwilled, and its imitation (podrazhanie) is not a shameful burglary (postydnoe pokhishchenie), a sign of intellectual poverty, but a noble hope in one’s own abilities (sobstvennye sily), the hope of discovering new worlds while following in the footsteps of genius—or an emotion that is the more sublime for its humility (smirenie): the desire to study a model thoroughly and grant it a second life.

These comments can serve as an enlightening summation of Pushkin’s discoveries in the Stone Island cycle. Fomichev notes that all of Pushkin’s lyric cycles are constructed according to the tripartite formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in which the “theme of spiritual regeneration” underlies the whole.[76] If we now take a step back from the cruciform symmetry we have traced in the Stone Island cycle and reconsider its poems in their proper order, we can see that it does follow Fomichev’s formula, although in what is perhaps a surprising way. The “thesis” of the cycle, consisting of “Iz Pindemonti” and “Ottsy pustynniki,” expresses a longing for escape—a hope for transcendence of the limitations of earthly existence—and explores feigned silence and humility as potential vehicles of liberation. In the cycle’s “antithesis,” consisting of “Podrazhanie ital′ianskomu” alone, the poet expresses his anguish at the possibility that this strategy of imitation and pretense is the equivalent of an artistic sellout (the postydnoe pokhishchenie mentioned in his review of Tepliakov’s poems) and, with no other options available to him, entertains thoughts of suicide and torture. Finally, in the “synthesis,” consisting of “Mirskaia vlast′” and “Kogda za gorodom,” he turns away from this grievous interpretation as well as the initial escape fantasy that prompted it; now he accepts the limitations of his existence and decides to maintain his personal dignity at the highest cost, combining confidence in his own abilities (sobstvennye sily) with reverence for primary creation, sublimity of emotion with humility—not before man or the God of any human canon—but before raw nature and death. In this way, as in the discussion of podrazhanie in the Tepliakov review, poetic ambition is reconciled at last with artistic discipleship. Indeed, by the end of the Stone Island cycle, Pushkin comes to accept that granting a second existence to a literary model—through his exercise of creative imitation—is, at this stage in his life, the essence of his poetic calling, to be followed only by his own death. His “spiritual regeneration” in the cycle consists (counterintuitively, perhaps) in the realization that he cannot accept the terms of spiritual “escape,” of life eternal. Through this recognition, he is paradoxically renewed as a poet, whose authority emanates, now, from his sober intimacy with death rather than from any higher realm.

Indeed, Surat’s comments on “Kogda za gorodom” reveal her awareness that death is, precisely, not just the destination but also the inspirational origin of the Stone Island cycle: “These are already some sort of posthumous verses (zasmertnye stikhi), which seem as if they were written from the other side (ottuda)” (emphasis in the original).[77] Such is indeed the case. By the close of the cycle, instead of resurrection, Pushkin foresees his own irreversible bodily demise; his poetry then—and the unfinished cycle in particular—becomes a missive from beyond the grave, a tantalizing message in a bottle left behind for the living to decipher later. It may even be possible to surmise that the cycle was intentionally left unfinished for this reason, since Pushkin habitually used the aesthetic of fragmentation to serve the needs of closure in his art.[78] Temporal discontinuities signal the reassuring continuities of a greater whole—the whole of nature and of art that, for Pushkin, transcends any human society or institution (including religion): “It is as if, from out of the infinite and uninterrupted flow of time, a certain accidental piece is arbitrarily captured; as if, at a given moment, we step with the author into the stream of time and just as easily and uneventfully exit from this stream.”[79] Pushkin’s fragments do, indeed, draw the reader irresistibly into their mysteries, making the reader into an active participant in the poet’s creation; this technique brilliantly counteracts what Barbara Herrnstein Smith terms “the expectation of nothing,” the end of dynamism that corresponds to poetic closure.[80]

“Verse…defines itself only at the point at which it ends,” the Italian philosopher of aesthetics Giorgio Agamben tells us. “Verse is the being that dwells in [the schism of sound and sense]…grounded in the perception of…limits and endings… The last verse trespasses into prose.”[81] Pushkin’s Stone Island cycle never makes this passage into the prosaic, for it ends before it ends. The poet is not “[fixed] in place like a worm in amber,” in Lawrence Lipking’s memorable phrase, but is released into unrecoverable nothingness; he makes himself invisible and inaudible, and in so doing, he guarantees the ceaseless mobility and tantalizing mystery of his verse.[82] He ventriloquizes himself so completely in the Stone Island cycle that he yields not just the right of primary creation, but even the right of human voice; the rustling of the oak tree that ends “Kogda za gorodom,” fittingly, is the last sound we hear as the cycle ends.

Of course, we know with the benefit of hindsight that “Kogda za gorodom” was not, in fact, to remain Pushkin’s final word on poetry, alienation, and death. Just one week after this poem was written, he composed his famous “Pamiatnik.” Like the poems of the Stone Island cycle, this one, too, is an imitation of multiple literary sources, by both Horace and Derzhavin—a fact that misled early commentators on the lyric, who overlooked the deeply personal nature of the poet’s statement. Alekseev, in his booklength study of “Pamiatnik,” corrects this misconception: “The direct reference to Horace (in the epigraph) and tacit nod to Derzhavin, who came to the reader’s memory of his own accord, were only the equivalent of a key signature in a musical manuscript—the sign of a choice of stylistic tonality in a personal poetic reworking of a theme, and, in part, also a concealment (maskirovka) of the too great independence of this interpretation.”[83] Evidently, Pushkin had learnt well the art of personalized imitation from the Stone Island cycle and had come to terms with its ethical implications; in “Pamiatnik,” he exploits the technique with great verve and self-assurance.

Despite this similarity of poetic strategy, however, the message and sensibility of “Pamiatnik” are diametrically opposed to those of the Stone Island cycle. In “Pamiatnik,” the poet confidently proclaims his own immortality, the preeminence of his poetic legacy, his creative composure and equanimity in the face of all persecution and misunderstanding, and the positive political impact of his life’s work (an early draft of the poem even linked Pushkin’s political activism with that of Radishchev[84]). Indeed, the second stanza of “Pamiatnik” rings out like a dialogical rejoinder to the Stone Island cycle, a pointed rebuttal of its embrace of oblivion and acceptance of the impossibility of escape: “Net, ves′ ia ne umru—dusha v zavetnoi lire / Moi prakh perezhivet i tlen′ia ubezhit” (No, I won’t die wholly—my soul in the cherished lyre will outlive my ashes and escape decay).[85] Such dramatic differences between “Pamiatnik” and the Stone Island cycle proliferate. Questions of self-sacrifice and violent death are not even broached in “Pamiatnik.” This poem unhesitatingly uses the language of Christianity—in particular, the adjective nerukotvornyi (not made by hands)—to describe the poet’s artistic achievement, without any intimation of a troubling contradiction in terms that must be mastered; at the same time, the paganistic term “muse” is effortlessly incorporated into the lyric’s expansive poetical-spiritual lexicon.[86] The poet commands his muse, moreover, to be “obedient” (poslushna) to divine authority. Pushkin in “Pamiatnik” exhibits no trace of discomfort at the idea that the poet, like Christ, has an earthly mission to fulfill before he passes on; nor does he admit here any contradiction between this idea and the un-Christlike hubris of the poem’s tone.

As is well known, Pushkin is a poet of extremes and contradictions; diametrically opposed treatments of the same theme are typical of his creative method. There is no doubt that the resounding “Pamiatnik” addresses the very same poetic and spiritual problems as do the quieter, more private poems of the Stone Island cycle. The fact that scholars such as Sloane and Mikkelson have produced richly suggestive, sensitive, and creative analyses of shared motifs between “Pamiatnik” and the Stone Island poems is, therefore, no surprise, any more than it is a surprise that the Stone Island cycle also strongly echoes the earlier “Prorok” as well as other meditative lyrics (“Pora, moi drug, pora!,” “Strannik,” “Naprasno ia begu”) that date from roughly the period when the cycle was composed. All these poems, indeed, address similar, urgent poetic concerns: the origin of poetic talent, the nature of poetic originality and imitation, the poet’s ethical responsibility for his words and deeds, the future of the poet’s creative legacy. “Pamiatnik” is a retort to the finality and silence that haunt Pushkin in the Stone Island cycle—a counterweight, not just to “Kogda za gorodom” as several scholars have argued,[87] but indeed to the cycle as a whole. Its inclusion within the Stone Island cycle would destroy the complex architectonic symmetry that, as we have seen, forms an indissoluble part of the cycle’s beauty and meaning. In the poems of the cycle, Pushkin perfects the art of independent imitation; “Pamiatnik” constitutes a logical last—and contradictory—step in this process: the poet’s creative imitation (reinvention) of himself, resulting in an endlessly dynamic loop, forever echoing and irresolvable. When we recognize this fundamental opposition of “Pamiatnik” to the Stone Island cycle, we grant both works the full measure of their poetic power.