It is habitual with critics, especially critics of Russian literature, to probe with a microscopic accuracy into the work of the subject they undertake to explain: they search for psychological phenomena untiringly, and are not content unless they can wrest a secret from the author which the author himself would certainly in many cases never have realised that he possessed. We see this in our own tongue in many of the critical essays on Shakespeare. We see it applied to Pushkin equally unnecessarily; for Pushkin needs no interpreter: he is delightfully human, clear, sincere, impulsive, vital and vivifying, as far removed as possible from any artfulness, the least of a digger in the depths of his own soul imaginable. He is the type of artist who sees Beauty in her naked blaze and straightway reincarnates her because he cannot help it. He is of the earth, earthy in the best sense of the word. The final word about him is that he accepted life open-heartedly and as a consequence requires in his readers an equal open-heartedness and nothing else.

He was brought up as a boy in an atmosphere of that sparkling elegance which we associate with the French, and himself wrote verses in that tongue, by the age of twelve acquiring a real taste in French literature. He revelled in Plutarch, Voltaire, Rousseau and MoliÈre, imitated the French comedies and acted them before his sister. As was customary in Russia, he was, as a boy, allowed free access to the society of the literary and artistic people who frequented his father's house. Here he entered into that life of boundless hospitality, disorderliness, whimsical jollity, and revelry, of erotic and bacchanalian orgies, which were typical of the upper classes of his time.

From his nurse, a life-long friend, he learnt to love the world of Russian folklore.

For five years, from twelve to seventeen, he was at the Lyceum, just then opened at the TsÀrskoye SelÒ, which reflected among its youthful pupils the same passions of illicit amours, drink, and literature which characterised the parents. They became a sort of jovial anarchists. Like the Elizabethans, they were as often intoxicated with poetry as with wine. Pushkin early became the leader, as was only natural: he was already the best-read man in Russia; he was enthusiastic over the work of his younger contemporaries; he was an ideal companion. Like Milton and most other geniuses of a high order, he recognised his mÉtier very early in his life. He wrote in his teens:

Not only so, but—

Exactness of expression is as important to Pushkin as it was to Pope, just as fearless honesty was the keystone of his personality.

It was at the public examination of the Lyceists in Russian literature in 1815 that he first came before the public eye. Together with other competitors he had to read his work before the old ode-writer D'erjÀvin, who was so thrilled by The Reminiscences of the TsÀrskoye SelÒ that he wanted to rush forward and embrace the young poet.

JukÒvski, then at the height of his fame, would read his verses to Pushkin and rely on his judgment. When in return Pushkin read RuslÀn and LudmÌla, JukÒvski gave the boy his portrait with this inscription: "To the victorious pupil from his conquered teacher."

Such treatment might well be expected to turn the head of the youth, but Pushkin was then, as ever, modest and extremely critical of his own work. He was, as I have said, always searching for hidden genius in others: he it was who first discovered Gogol, and when that Dickens of Russia published Dead Souls and The Inspector-General, the subjects in each case being suggested to him by Pushkin, the poet said delightedly: "The rascal robs me in such a bewitching way that it is impossible to be angry with him."

Pushkin's father declined to allow him to take a commission in the Hussars, and at eighteen the poet obtained a post in the Foreign Office, where he had much leisure, and plunged deeper than ever into the excesses common to his time, with the result that, though he swam, rode, fenced and walked to keep himself fit, twice in his nineteenth and twentieth years he nearly lost his health. Nor did his riotous living prevent him from working hard at his poetry.

In 1820 the long fairy tale RuslÀn and LudmÌla appeared. The nearest approach to it in England is Hero and Leander—sensuous yet cold. Everywhere it was read, copied out and learnt by heart by tradesman and noble alike. The story was founded on the national folklore. A wicked, humped dwarf carries away the only daughter of Prince Vladimir of Kiev from her nuptial bed to his castle: RuslÀn, the bridegroom, and three disappointed lovers give chase. The adventures of the four warriors, LudmÌla's seclusion in the wizard's castle and RuslÀn's ultimate victory by hanging on to the long beard of the dwarf as he flies over seas and forests form the plot of the story.

The method of handling the story was fascinating, and quite new to Russia. It was vigorous, whimsical, absolutely natural and human: it was this last characteristic in particular which captivated the hearts of the whole race. Russia always loves the natural—but she did not yet recognise why it was that Pushkin especially appealed to her: there had been hitherto no realistic school.

No one realised, Pushkin least of all, that RuslÀn and LudmÌla laid the foundation-stone of all future Russian literature.

The two schools then in existence, the pseudo-classical and the romantic, debated savagely as to which category Pushkin belonged. They were unable to grasp the significance of this bubbling over of human fun, this directness of detail; indignation at such ideas as "RuslÀn's tickling with his spear the nostrils of the giant's head," as bringing the national element into poetry at all, and so on, spread fast.

In the same year Pushkin threw himself heart and soul into the movement of young reformers, and joined the "Society of Welfare," which somewhat naturally roused the Government to action.

Alexander I. was for banishing him; Karamzin, however, pleaded for him with such effect that he was only sent to Bessarabia for a year. His banishment only accentuated his popularity. He took advantage of his retirement to write The Prisoner of the Caucasus in eight hundred lines, the main feature of which is the first appearance in his work of that grand reverence for women which is one of Pushkin's greatest charms.

A man in a Circassian village brings home one day as prisoner a young Russian, who has left his usual world to find freedom in the wilderness: being captured, he is put in irons and left to drag out his days in a cave. A young Circassian girl falls in love with him; he responds out of pity, being in love with another girl at home who did not, however, return his affection. The girl, struck with grief, yet understands, and gives up visiting him secretly, and while the tribe are away raiding she comes with a saw and dagger and gives him his freedom. They part with a kiss of great human love. The young man, touched to the heart, looks back after he has swum the river, but the girl is nowhere to be seen and "only a circle widens on the face of the water, in the gentle shine of the moon." ... The public swallowed the poem greedily, the description of the manners of the Circassians especially attracting them. In another poem Pushkin uses a legend which he came across while visiting the ancient capital of the Crimean Tartars.

The young Tartar Khan, GivÈy, captures in a raid on Poland a young Christian princess, Mary, and conceals her in his harem. Her purity and saintly beauty so work upon him that he remains in awe before her. Another beauty, ZarÈma, once a favourite of GivÈy, implores Mary to make her man come back to her: failing, of course, ZarÈma kills her and is herself drowned. The Khan in despair leaves his harem and goes out to wage wars, and returns in the end to build a fountain in memory of Mary, over which he erects a crescent crowned with a cross.

It was at this time that Pushkin fell under the influence of Byron and learned English to do so: not that he imitated Byron, but he was braced up to do something equally good in another way. This was in KishinÒv, a hot-bed of noisy, passionate freethinking blended with Asiatic aboriginality. He fought three duels, one of them resulting from a quarrel at a ball as to whether a waltz or a mazurka should be next on the programme. He then fell in love with a gipsy and joined the camp to which the girl belonged. The result was another poem called The Gipsies.

The hero, a man of society, comes to join the free life of a gipsy tribe because he despises the degenerating effect of civilisation. He has had enough of people in cities.

The gipsies admit him into their careless, free, happy life. AlÈko, as they call him, falls in love with the only child of a very wise old man and is happy, just loving, lying about in the sun and taking round for show a tame bear.

ZemphÌra, the girl, after bearing a son to AlÈko, gets tired of him and falls in love with another gipsy. AlÈko feels this very much and complains to her father, who tells him that he too in his youth lost his love in a similar way.

"'And thou didst not kill her lover?'" asks her lover. The old gipsy replies:

This does not satisfy AlÈko, who kills ZemphÌra and her lover, after which the old father implores him to leave their free, kind world and return to civilisation.

Pushkin next writes a Mazeppa of his own, the epic of Peter the Great, but not idealised as Byron's was.... The heroine Mar?a leaves her lover and becomes insane when her father is executed.

This stern, objective fragment of an epic, falling into their sentimental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses, and cupids, was like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan and executed by a god ... it is not surprising that it met with little or no appreciation. It is as if Tennyson had followed up his early poems in a style as concise as Pope's and as concentrated as Browning's dramatic lyrics. It revealed an entirely new phase in his style: hitherto it had seemed as shining and luscious fruit, now it became a concentrated, weighty tramp of ringing rhyme.

Pushkin has been accused (not by the Russians) of sentimentality ... a charge that can be confuted by quoting almost any of his lines at random.

Does this, for instance, reek of sentimentality?—

Or this?—

Or this Tenth Commandment?—

He was not given to brooding over disappointment, nor was there any self-centredness about him. Only once, on his twenty-eighth birthday, does he show himself obsessed with the problems of existence:

He was, par excellence, the singer of this world, reflecting it with a photographic exactness. Gogol called it reality turned into a pearl of creation, which is about the best and most concise definition we could require.

As a result of this Byronic obsession Pushkin was sent to Odessa to join the staff of the Governor. But the atmosphere of rectitude and cold officialdom bored him: trying his best was no good here: he was sent into the depths of the country to do easy and interesting reconnaissance work, to investigate the causes and results of the locust plague. The following is his official report:—

About this time he wrote to a friend a letter which was intercepted. It ran as follows:—

"I am reading the Bible. The Holy Ghost sometimes soothes me, but I prefer Goethe and Shakespeare. There is an Englishman here, a clever atheist, who overturns the theory of immortality—I am having lessons from him...."

The reading public got to know of it and devoured it ... officially it led to his banishment to the estate of his parents. His father bullied him so that he begged to be sent to a fortress. JukÒvski intervened and his parents left him to the care of his nurse, and he had two years of quiet, learning more and more of the old folklore. He wrote six long fairy tales of the school of RuslÀn and LudmÌla. He wrote the long historical poem PoltÀva, the novel in verse, EvgÈni OnyÈgin, the historical drama in blank verse, BorÌs GodunÒv, the story in verse, The Bronze Horsemen, and dozens of shorter poems. He abandoned Byron for Shakespeare.

"Shakespeare," he wrote about this time—"what a man! I am overwhelmed. What a nonentity Byron is with his travesty of tragedy, as compared to Shakespeare." We can trace this influence in BorÌs GodunÒv.

Shakespeare helped him to develop his power of realism: even his wonderland becomes a matter of course—Russia.

EvgÈni OnyÈgin swept the country off its feet. Society suddenly saw the greatness of the simple beauty of Russia, the dignified, lovable Russian woman: in the hero he reflects his own education, tastes and manners: it is the first work of a consciously psychological analysis in Russian literature.

The typical man of society is bored with life because he does not know what real life is: he "hastened to live and hurried to feel" on too narrow a scale. His first blow is the realisation of the fact that the thoughtful girl of seventeen, whose love he neglected early in life, rejects his passion when she, married, is shining and dignified in society life. Then only, being honestly told by her that she still loves him, but is going to remain true to her husband, he flies from the capital, tortured by his first deep heart pain. Here the story ends. At the beginning he kills a romantic poet, Lensky, in a duel, a man of whom he is genuinely fond, but to whose fiancÉe, Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face like the foolish moon, he pays court out of sheer devilry. The elder sister, Tatiana, shy and dreamy, and yet clean-cut in character and iron-willed, is the girl who has given her heart to OnyÉgin and afterwards rejects him. She is as real as Diana Middleton or Sophia Western, as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman, taken straight from life, the crowning glory of Russian life. Mr Baring puts her confession of love on a level with Romeo and Juliet's leave-taking as one of the absolutely perfect things in the literature of the world. It is, he says, a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as spontaneous as a blackbird's song. It is Pushkin's most characteristic work. It is certainly the best-known and most popular. It is all—like Hamlet—quotations! Pushkin himself speaks as having seen the unfettered march of the novel in a magic prism. The scenes are clear, the nail is hit on the head every time, all the labour escapes notice. It arrests the attention as a story, it is amusing; it delights the intelligence. It is simply a story of everyday life executed perfectly by a master spirit.

The girl beseeches him to leave her.

Pushkin's own opinion of the work is shown in the dedication:

In form the novel is like Childe Harold. But the descriptions, the irony, and humour are truly Russian.

As an example of all three in one these may suffice:

"For forty years he nagged with his housekeeper, looked out of the window and squashed flies."

"Once upon a time the head of a secret team of gamblers, now he was a kind and simple father of a bachelor's numerous brood, living the life of a true philosopher: planting cabbages, breeding ducks and geese and teaching his youngsters the A B C."

All the characters use genuine everyday speech, and yet the realistic subjects are magically turned into poetry. "One can be a serious man and yet think of the beauty of one's nails."

An example of his descriptive power may be found in this stanza on Moscow:

As you can see even from these few extracts, the realism in OnyÉgin is the realism of Jane Austen—meticulous, correct, amazingly sketched in.

He imitated the Koran, blending sensuality with religious enthusiasm and even the element of nonsense in a way that is inimitably reminiscent of the Eastern Law.

Equally brilliant are his Imitations of Dante ... the Divine Comedy lives again for us in Pushkin's rendering: again, in The Journeying of CÆsar, we seem to be reading the Latin classics themselves. But his prose-work as a whole is perhaps below his poetry, though Baring does not think so. Unfortunately in England it is on these very prose works that we have for the most part to rely, because so few of his poems are translated.

He was not born with a passion to reform the world: he was neither Liberal nor Conservative: he was a democrat in his love for the Russian people, a patriot in his love of his country.

There seem to have been in him, however, two distinct spirits, as in so many other Russians—the inspired priest of Apollo and the most frivolous of all the frivolous children of the world. The former characteristic predominated, but the people, his readers, preferred his latter mood; they like the dazzling colours, the sensuousness of his early poems—they could not appreciate the nobler, simpler and more majestic harmonies of BorÌs GodunÒv and OnyÉgin.

It is this two-sidedness that makes for his all-embracing humanity—Dostoievsky called him pa?a?d??p??—this capacity for understanding everybody which makes him so profoundly Russian. He set free the Russian language from the bondage of the conventional and, like Peter the Great, spent his whole life in apprenticeship and all his energies in craftsmanship. He is completely the artist and never the fighter, which explains the coldness of much of his work.

He was no innovator of forms in his verse: he was content to follow the accepted types; nor did he ever fly too high ... he does not try to unlock the gates of the Unknown: the old iambic introduced by LomonÒsov was good enough for him. Only in BorÌs GodunÒv does he break out into an imitation of Shakespearean form: the play is rather like Henry VIII. in its plan: it is a succession of isolated scenes, not a coherent drama; there is no definite beginning or end.

On the other hand his scenes, taken by themselves, tragic or comic, are as vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters all live and are convincing.

As a chronicle it is completely successful. There are scenes so inspired as to be really in spirit Shakespearean, an absence of all conscious effort and visible artifice which only the greatest artists can attain to.

As there are no innovations, so are there no mannerisms: metaphors and similes are few and apt. Of Peter the Great we read:

Wholesome, breezy, clear-cut, genuine, free and honest—those are the adjectives to apply to his art. Unfortunately it is impossible to convey in English the ring and beauty of his original work.

While he was at home the Decembrists' revolt took place, 14th December 1824. He was absent from all his old friends and was naturally concerned about them. He petitioned the Government, signing a pledge never to join any secret society, to give him his liberty. One morning a field-yeger appeared, gave him time to put on his greatcoat and take his money, enter the sledge and dash to Petrograd. After travelling two hundred miles he was brought before the young Emperor and the following conversation took place:—

"Pushkin, I hope thou art pleased with thy return. Wouldst thou take part in the 14th December if thou wert here?"

"By all means, Sovereign. All my friends were in it. My absence alone has saved me."

"Well, thou hast played the fool sufficiently long. I hope thou wilt be sensible in the future, and we shall not quarrel. Send me all thy manuscripts. I shall be thy censor myself."

He was received everywhere with open arms. He joined the main current of social and literary life and speedily electrified society. He was for a little entirely happy, but he had overestimated the extent of his freedom. Gradually he realised that he was not allowed even to read aloud his writings without submitting them to his censor.

BorÌs GodunÒv was refused on the plea that it would have been better if the author had rewritten it in prose, turning it into a historical novel like those of Sir Walter Scott. Consequently the drama did not appear till 1831, much polished and toned down.

In these last years Pushkin founded and edited a literary monthly called The Contemporary, which played a great part in the development of the literature of Russia later on.

The net of officialdom was meanwhile being drawn tighter and tighter round him: he had to attend compulsory meaningless ceremonies at the Court. The Government gave him 20,000 roubles for the publication of his works, and elected him member of the Academy. But they would not allow him to retire from the service. In 1829 he dashed away to the Caucasus without leave.

He joined the ranks and fought, but returned safely. He then married a society beauty whom he loved sincerely but who increased his expenses enormously. He continued to train his talents and wrote a series of brilliant epigrams which increased the number of his friends and foes. He had enemies in every camp.... Meanwhile a young officer, of French and Dutch extraction, by name Baron Dantes, began to press his attentions on Pushkin's wife. Pushkin received a series of anonymous letters ... he, however, trusted his wife completely. She urged him to retire with her to the country to get away from the impending doom, but he challenged the Baron, who had by that time married the sister of Pushkin's wife. Pushkin was fatally wounded in the duel and died mourned by a whole nation.... And what is his legacy? He must have been no mean poet who could induce Turgenev to say that he would burn all his works if he could but have written four lines of the conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet.

His legacy is that he stripped Reality from her daintily-coloured veil—not to show her possible hideousness, but to enjoy the beauty of her form. And beneath his hands nakedness rose like a piece of magic sculpture, warm and breathing of life. His variety and the width of his range are astonishing.

I have attempted to convey something of this. He can write an elegy as tender as Tennyson, a picture of a snowstorm in intoxicating rhythms which would have made Poe green with jealousy; his patriotic poems are lofty and inspired, his prayers humble, sincere and devout. His love poems are as playful as Heine's, as tender as Musset's; he can translate with equal spirit and exactness Byron and Horace, the Koran and Dante. Mr Baring selects two poems as examples of the greatness of his style and the force of his magic.

The other and greater is The Prophet, which is Miltonic in conception and Dantesque in expression: it is, Mr Baring says, the Pillars of Hercules of the Russian language.

"My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, and I was astray in the dark wilderness. And the Seraphim with six wings appeared to me at the crossing of the ways: and he touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as soft as sleep; and like the eyes of an eagle that is frightened my prophetic eyes were awakened. He touched my ears and he filled them with noise and with sound: and I heard the Heavens shuddering and the flight of the angels in the height, and the moving of the beasts that are under the waters, and the noise of the growth of the branches in the valley. He bent down over me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore out my sinful tongue, and he took away that which is idle and that which is evil with his right hand, and his right hand was dabbled with blood; and he set there in its stead, between my perishing lips, the tongue of a wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder with a sword, and he plucked out my trembling heart, and in my cloven breast he set a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the desert I lay, and the voice of God called and said unto me, 'Prophet, arise, and take heed, and hear; be filled with my will, and go forth over the sea and over the land and set light with my word to the hearts of the people.'"