Alexander Dolinin. Pushkin i Angliia: Tsikl statei. Nauchnaia biblioteka.  Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007.  276 pp. Index. ISBN 5-86793-520-5. Cloth.

The articles that constitute this collection are engaging, erudite, and lively. The style of the essays is all the more praiseworthy, since Dolinin’s methodology calls for rather heavy reading: the book is an unabashed exercise in German-style philology. Dolinin wastes no time in his quest for sources, variants, and other philological niceties, exhibiting scholarship that gives most people—unless they are German philologists themselves—a slight headache caused by the ever-failing effort to keep in mind the ever-expanding network of names and citations. The titles of the essays speak for themselves: “From Investigations Around ‘Anchar’ (Sources, Parallels, Interpretations)” or “Pushkin’s Poem Angelo: Sources and Generic Peculiarities.”

Dolinin negotiates the pitfalls of his approach splendidly and writes in a lucid and absorbing manner. The essays are nuanced and well informed; they provide extensive summaries of previous scholarship while frequently suggesting intriguing new readings. Furthermore, Dolinin’s argumentation is always convincing and elegant.

The book opens with an informative survey, “Pushkin and England,” in which Dolinin investigates Pushkin’s indebtedness to English literature in terms of language, imagery, style, structure, modes of self-presentation, as well as political and historical thought. The focus is on Pushkin’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Burke, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Walter Scott. Dolinin charts Pushkin’s maturation in terms of his relationship with literary models, as he moves from the radicalism of the Byronic mode toward the enlightened conservatism of Southey and Wordsworth.

I find the last essay of the collection, “Walter Scott’s Historicism and The Captain’s Daughter,” the most faithful to the themes delineated in the introduction, as well as the most insightful and original. Comparing Pushkin’s historical method to that of Scott is hardly a new enterprise, yet Dolinin highlights the intellectual and formal structure of both novelists while exploring the contrast between the two. Such a comparison enables him to articulate a fascinating matrix of Christian values that informs the unfolding of both history and human interaction in Pushkin’s novel. Strongly conceptual and firmly grounded in textual data, this essay illuminates the philosophical grid that underlies Pushkin’s view of historical and cultural processes.

The rest of the essays fall short of the high bar raised by the Captain’s Daughter article, however, as they tend to avoid the head-on confrontation with Pushkin’s thought and ideology. Most of the essays are no more and no less than extended footnotes on various questions of sources, textology, and so on. Dolinin is primarily interested in discussing, fine-tuning, or modifying the positivistic findings of others. Consequently, one learns a fair amount about Pushkin’s craft—his Anglicisms and Gallicisms, his misreadings of English phrases or his borrowings from plots invented by others—but very little about his intellectual and creative engagement with such giants of world literature as Shakespeare,    Milton, or Byron.

Three essays scrutinize the literary sources and generic peculiarities of Pushkin’s poetry: his narrative poem Angelo in one case, and the lyrical poems “From Pindemonti” and “Anchar” in two others. Dolinin also analyzes the sources of Pushkin’s poetic renditions of the legend of King Rodrigo of Spain, and places these poems within the context of Pushkin’s spiritual maturation. In another essay, he discusses Pushkin’s unfinished biographical study of Byron: “Byron in Pushkin’s Mirror: Two Reflections.” By concentrating on a seemingly marginal issue—Pushkin’s obscure comments on Byron’s Russian references in Don Juan and Sardanapalus— Dolinin manages not only to decipher the political and literary relevance of these comments, but also to discuss them in the dual context of Pushkin’s rhetorical skills and his view of the Decembrist Uprising.

Two more essays explore Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. The essay on “The Covetous Knight” examines Pushkin’s indebtedness to Shakespeare and Walter Scott both in terms of imagery and the paradoxical structure of thought, while “‘A Feast in Time of Plague’ and the Problem of the Unity of Little Tragedies” surveys the literary (not necessarily English) sources of the play. For Dolinin, the cycle owes its unity to the ever-increasing presence of the theme of spiritualism: during his Boldino period, Pushkin, according to Dolinin, was haunted by the theme of “visions from beyond the grave” (grobovye videniia) and treated it in various keys and genres—ranging from the comic and lyrical to the tragic.

Dolinin is fairly convincing when he examines Pushkin’s unfinished texts: it is there that traditional philology with its exploration of sources, subtexts, and contexts can be most helpful in charting the trajectory of Pushkin’s thought.  But can the trajectory of a genius’s thought really be charted?  Pushkin is admired for his final products, not his drafts. In one draft he wrote, “I want to live in order to think and dream” (myslit' i mechtat'), a romantic cliché if ever there was one, for example, yet in the final version he would write “I want to live in order to think and suffer.” Can any philologist predict such a turn of phrase? Consequently, imagining and reconstructing Pushkin’s plots is a rather ungrateful exercise, even though many respected scholars find it appealing.

The overall value of the book can therefore be questioned on various grounds. For starters, the misleading title. What interests Dolinin is not so much Pushkin’s engagement with the literary giants of English literature, but rather the literary sources of Pushkin’s imagery, diction, and thought. Some of these sources are English, but Dolinin manifests similar zeal in tracing Pushkin’s sources to the Bible, Seneca, De Vigny, Katenin, and everyone else in between.

One can also object to a rather conscious effort to avoid original readings and interpretations. Dolinin is clearly limited by his own methodology, one which casts the literary scholar in the role of a lawyer presenting a court case: he must provide the factual information while avoiding analysis lest some imaginary opponent attack his ideas as “speculation.” One can speculate on the origins and longevity of this positivistic turn in Soviet philology, but the evidence is there and clearly felt throughout this collection.

Consequently, one appreciates learning that “From Pindemonte” can be viewed as Pushkin’s response to Southey’s self-congratulatory poem on the nature of English liberties and traditions, and not to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, as was claimed by E. G. Etkind (228–32). Yet, Pushkin’s poem has plenty of other things to offer besides challenging Southey’s self-righteous attitude. By going back to the biblical “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” Pushkin reminds us of the joys that one experiences when carrying out one’s duties to an authority other than Caesar—regardless of whether Caesar’s rule is democratic or tyrannical. Pushkin provides here an early example of Russian nihilism and anarchism, skeptical as it was toward social institutions (such as democracy, freedom of speech) viewed by the West as admirable if not sacred.

Of course, poets like Shakespeare and Milton visited this issue long before Pushkin. Milton reminded his readers to search for “paradise within… happier far” (XII, 587), while Shakespeare warned that a republic would not prevent one from deadly passions (Othello), and that rot might consume the most peaceful, enlightened, and well organized of kingdoms (Hamlet). The same Shakespeare bitterly mocked the republican pronouncements of Brutus not only as treacherous or ungrateful, but more importantly as anachronistic and destructive both to the political body and to the bodies of poets (Julius Caesar). How does Pushkin’s view compare to that of his illustrious English predecessors?

Alexander Blok observed that when geniuses meet something extraordinary happens (“as when the collision of clouds produces lighting”) (1901). He was referring to Pushkin’s encounter with Peter the Great, and Dostoevsky’s with Christ. Pushkin‘s encounter with Shakespeare must have produced a similar release of energy, but its presence is hardly felt in this book.

Clearly, one cannot fault the author for avoiding issues that go beyond the focus of his study. Dolinin prefers to stay within the firm parameters of subtexts, texts, and acknowledged influences. But I suspect that a reader of a book entitled Pushkin and England has the right to expect not just textual, but also intellectual, philosophical, literary, and religious engagement with the country whose values and actions seem frequently antithetical to Russia’s own. Of all people, Pushkin was aware of the cultural dissonance between Russia and England and gave the matter a great amount of thought: “What is needed for London is too early for Moscow.”

Reliance on the methodology and scholarship of such giants of Soviet pushkinistika as Iakubovich, Alekseev, Tsiavlovskii, Tomashevskii, Vatsuro, and Lotman is admirable. Yet one of the drawbacks of this school was a rather cavalier dismissal of Western studies that indeed call for speculation and dare to think along with Pushkin. Dolinin shares the prejudice of his predecessors and fails to mention a number of relevant recent studies, including Sam Driver’s Pushkin: Literature and Social Ideas (1989) and Svetlana Evdokimova’s Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (1999), which, in fact, address the social and historical dimensions of Pushkin’s engagement with British authors.

And one more caveat about the language of these essays. Lively, precise, and engaging as his writing frequently is, on the issue of Anglicisms and Gallicisms, Dolinin remains as carefree as his illustrious subject, peppering his presentation with such terms as obsentnyi, kon'ektura, destruktsiia, optativ, karitativnyi, initsial'nyi, konversionnyi, and editsionnyi. I am not fond of the use of such terminology in Russian texts, but if the editors of the trend-setting Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie find it acceptable, it must be so.

Vladimir Golstein
Brown University

Citation:
Golstein, Vladimir.  Rev. of Pushkin i Angliia: Tsikl statei, by Alexander Dolinin.  Pushkin Review 10 (2007): 171 - 74. <http://www.pushkiniana.org/component/content/article/100-vol10reviews/128-golstein-review10.html>.

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