Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

I do not wish to sadden you with anything.

I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,

Tormented now by timidity, now by jealousy;

I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,

As God grant you be loved by another.

This poem is quintessentially ‘Pushkinian’ in its dignified plainness and apparently self-explanatory directness; it is sometimes used (not wholly accurately) as an instance of the poet’s distaste for metaphor. But in fact, there is a good deal more here than first meets the eye or the ear. Among many buried associations is the point that the opening lines of the poem evoke ‘feminine language’ – the new language of the emotions that Sentimentalism had seen as women’s particular domain. Great rhythmic emphasis is placed on verbs such as ‘to trouble’ and ‘to sadden’, as well as on the metaphor of love as flame (this hackneyed image is delicately suggested through the verb ‘to burn out’, usually used of lamps or candles). The second half of the poem opposes to these conventional verbs and figures of speech a hyperbolic evocation of unutterable love, emotionally inarticulate, yet also the gift of a (masculine) Deity. The use of religious language in the final line is far from incidental, since this language stands both for sincerity and for ‘Russianness’ in the later Pushkin (as, for example, in one of his last poems, ‘Desert fathers and immaculate women’ (1836)). The effect is that ‘masculine’ sincerity displaces what can be seen, once the poem’s narrative is complete, as charming, ‘feminine’ artifice. The ‘feminine’ vocabulary of affect becomes the starting point rather than the end of inspiration. Its particularity is opposed to the universality of the ‘masculine’ religious text. Evoking feminine language, Pushkin at the same time refuses to be limited by it: ‘I loved you’ moves from ventriloquism of the beloved’s speech to assertion of another and very different set of linguistic values.

Pushkin was no misogynist. The writer would have been shocked to hear such a suggestion: in his day, the typical misogynist was a surly country squire or boorish merchant who thought that education would turn girls into bad wives, and believed it ‘unchristian for any grown man to sit at the feet of a female’. Traces of this attitude can be found in the work of some early nineteenth-century writers, including talents as brilliant as Gogol, but not in Pushkin’s own poetry or fiction, which is notable for its finely drawn and sympathetic portraits of women (the inspiration to women writers as well as men). But it is hard to argue with a historian who, after sifting through all the writer’s essays, reviews, and jottings, concluded that Pushkin (like many of his contemporaries) unreservedly admired only one woman author, Madame de Staël. There is a striking contrast, too, between the roles played by male and female addressees in his letters, verse epistles, and dedications to published works (the latter are the subjects of gallantry sometimes tinged with eroticism, while the former cover a far wider range, from confidants to debating partners, from rivals to confederates in debauchery).

To argue along these lines does not mean placing Pushkin on a list of writers deserving critical annihilation, summoning him before what one senior American Slavist, writing in 1994, sarcastically termed ‘the stern tribunal of assistant professors’. Gender-aware criticism does not have to amount to ideologized proscription. Nor – to rebut another hostile argument occasionally used against it – does it require the imposition of modern views on texts from different eras. ‘Feminism’ refers to a geographically and historically limited phenomenon (a European movement, or series of movements, beginning in the sixteenth century). But sexual difference and sexual acts are an abiding obsession in all human societies. There is no evidence whatever that Pushkin was interested in, or even aware of, the feminism of his day (it is most unlikely that he had read, say, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women). He could not have anticipated the theories of Gayatri Spivak or Hélène Cixous, any more than he could those of Marx and Lenin. But he was without doubt passionately interested in issues of sex and gender, in what he, along with most educated people of his day, considered an obvious but fascinating and awkward truth, that men and women were immutably different.