The Great Courses

Lecture 30: When Sholokhov’s Cossacks think of war, they think of the Cossack traditions of cavalry charges and hand-to-hand combat. In World War I, they face the armies of industrialized Germany and Austria-Hungary. The novel’s presentation of historical change is only intensified by the ideological strife, new for the Cossacks, involved in revolutions and civil war. Suddenly, all of the old social norms turn topsy-turvy, and a politically uneducated man like Gregor, as well as his family and friends, are hard pressed to know in which direction to turn. They end up on many different sides, hardly recognizing people that they have known since childhood. In many ways, the same holds true for the supposedly stalwart ranks of the Bolsheviks, who position themselves to destroy the Cossack culture and life. The novel is an unsurpassed presentation of what it feels like to experience revolution firsthand. Some 35 years after writing the novel, Sholokhov would occupy a very different position when he called for the execution of some dissidents in the USSR. Then, some of his previously loyal readers excoriated him with a horrendous curse for a writer: “We wish you complete sterility.” Suggested Reading: Isaak Babel, The Collected Stories, which includes “Red Cavalry” and other stories that offer a different account of the Cossacks who fought on the side of the Red Army and the Bolsheviks. Roy Medevedev, Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov.

Lecture 29: Sholokhov’s best work goes along lines very different from what we have seen in Gorky and Maiakovsky. If to them, the revolution represented something highly desired and necessary, Sholokhov saw it as a tragic force that wiped out a whole community—the Cossacks— who were very dear and close to him. It was entirely natural that these people, with their vigorous and colorful (albeit crude) culture, who had occupied a privileged position for three centuries under the tsars, formed the most active and militarily effective resistance to the establishment of a new revolutionary regime. In the first part of And Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov gives a vivid picture of pre-World War I Cossack life, with its rich farms, love of horses, lust for women, and a military tradition that habitually struck terror in the hearts of all enemies, foreign and domestic, of the tsar. Seen largely through the eyes of a decent man, Gregor Melekhov, Cossack life and lands appear in all their glory and all their defects. Suggested Reading: C. G. Bearne, Sholokhov. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don, translated by Stephen Garry.

Lecture 28: As the 1920s went forward, it became clear that socialist dreams were not sufficiently powerful to deal with economic and political realities. Maiakovsky’s work began to take on a more defensive, less hopeful tone. He felt that he had to stave off attacks from his fellow socialists, as he shows in “At the Top of My Voice.” Then, in 1929, he completed a very ambivalent and moving play, The Bedbug. Woody Allen’s film Sleeper is, in many ways, derived from this play. The piece goes from an ironic derision of “bourgeoisius vulgaris” to a nostalgic fondness for the same and a hideous foretaste of Stalinist arrests and killings. One year later, Maiakovsky played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol and lost! His monument, not far from the center of Moscow, still preserves his defiant stance and the image of his expansive poetry. Suggested Reading: Vladimir Maiakovsky, Vladimir MajakovskijMemoirs and Essays (some in English, some in Russian), edited by Beng Jangfeldt and Nils Ake Nilsson. Herbert Marshall, Mayakovsky.

Lecture 27: To create the literature of the new—and of the soon-to-be spotless— world of socialism, which would prepare the way eventually for complete communism, Maiakovsky joined in the new organization called Proletarian Culture (Proletkul’t). This organization was to include genuine workers, who could write with a new proletarian class consciousness. Alas, despite their consciousness, their writing was abominable. Maiakovsky, on the other hand, had a brilliant poetic talent, and his verse became an important part of the work that the Soviet government presented to the world as proof of the creative force of socialism. His evocation of the Sun to visit the proletarian poet, his cry for a creative surge from ‘the army of the arts,” even his paeon to the futuristic (albeit bourgeois) architecture of the Brooklyn Bridge, all stoked the fires of passionate socialism. This view was quite a contrast with Gorky’s attachment to the best of world culture that had existed before the revolution. Suggested Reading: Vladimir Maiakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, edited and with commentary by Patricia Blake; translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey. Lawrence Stahlberger, The Symbolic System of Majakovskij.

Lecture 26: During the First World War, two revolutions took place in what had been the tsarist empire of Russia. The first, in February–March 1917, overthrew Tsar Nikolai II and attempted to establish a democratic government. The second, under V. I. Lenin and his Bolsheviks in October–November 1917, overthrew the provisional democracy and sought to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1923, the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was adopted, which lasted until 1991. The new government was determined to put into practice the doctrine of Marxism, which meant that its leaders had to direct and control every aspect of human life toward the goal of a perfect society, labeled “complete communism.” Naturally, Russian literature, long concerned with the “eternal questions,” became a prime target and concern of such a regime. Gorky, in spite of his initial shock at the violence connected with the revolution, stayed loyal to the revolutionary cause. At times, though, he tried to protect writers and intellectuals from the excesses of Communist Party control. Suggested Reading: Alexander Kaun, Maxim Gorky and His Russia. Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution.

Lecture 25: Gorky’s real name means “pawn”; his pseudonym means “bitter.” In those two words, we have the essence of this remarkable personality, who had real talent, which he sometimes, but not always, revealed in writing that shook Russia and the world. For several years in the early 20th century, he even eclipsed the fame of Tolstoy. Destined to live on the chronological edge between two political and social systems, which were separated by two revolutions and a bloody civil war, he became a symbol of that change, ending his career as a kind of Soviet icon. Of course, he was no saint, and wide propagandistic worship only served to conceal the reality of his life and work. It also meant that he was extravagantly praised by some and equally extravagantly reviled by others. His appearance in New York City in 1906 resulted in a scandal that drove away Mark Twain, who had been the head of a committee formed to welcome Gorky to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Let’s examine the reality, briefly, but as objectively as we can. I believe we will find both literary art and human decency well worth our effort and attention. Suggested Reading: Maxim Gorky, Autobiography of Maxim Gorky, translated by Isidor Schneider. Edward Wasiolek, ed., “Gorky’s Memoirs of Lev Tolstoy,” in Critical Essays on Tolstoy. Irwin Weil, M. Gorky: His Literary Development and Influence on Soviet Intellectual Life.

Lecture 24: In the 1890s, we come to the end of what is generally called the Golden Age of Russian Literature. To be sure, the art of Chekhov is hardly, or only slightly, below the level of the writers we have already considered. If you enter the American or British world of theater, you will soon find that Chekhov is its god. Although he is famous for some outstanding short stories, The Darling, Grief, The Lady with the Pet Dog, which convey deep human feelings in a very economical, brief way, his plays form a kind of bedrock for the modern theater as we know it. Such plays include his early Seagull, an initial failure on the St. Petersburg stage but a success in the hands of Stanislavsky, the dynamo of the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre, and The Cherry Orchard, a clear reference to a new order coming to Russia in the 20th century. These dramatic works, in a very quiet and restrained way, define a universe of human feelings that we barely know we possess yet recognize immediately when we see them in Chekhov’s theatrical art. There is one more scene that he might have written, had his hand still been in working order: It would have been that of the train car, labeled “fresh oysters,” bearing him in his coffin. Suggested Reading: Anton Chekhov, “The Darling,” in The Portable Chekhov, with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, in Plays, translated and edited by Eugene Bristow, Norton Critical Edition. Paul Debreczeny and Thomas Eekman, eds., Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays. J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance.

Lecture 23: In addition to a series of extremely finely crafted short stories and novellas, Turgenev wrote several relatively short novels. One of them, Fathers and Sons of 1861, was destined to become one of Europe’s defining moments in 19th-century prose. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as many Western writers, took the form and ideas of this novel as a basis for their own work. With his invention of the political word nihilist - one who wants to destroy all present institutions - Turgenev managed to touch the essence of the biblical question from Genesis 22:1−18, the story that relates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son. Any binding (the Hebrew title Akedah means “binding”) between generations requires not only accord but also friction that can even threaten to become mortal. It is the latter that we see in Fathers and Sons. Bazarov and the Kirsanov family become the modern characters in this universal drama. Suggested Reading: V. S. Pritchett, The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (A Norton Critical Edition), edited and translated by Ralph Matlaw, collected critical articles at the end of the Norton Critical Edition.

Lecture 22: Turgenev had both the pleasure and pain of being the contemporary of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Although in his day Turgenev was generally considered the best of Russian prose writers, especially by his Western friends Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, the Russian now tends to be depicted by a faintly concealed condescension, the poor relative of his more talented compatriots. This depiction is grossly unfair, as anyone who has read Turgenev’s prose with half a heart can testify. Yet life itself seemed determined to put Turgenev down. He was once challenged by Tolstoy to a duel, and he was branded as a coward when he wisely avoided such a potential tragedy. Later, there was the famous reconciliation at Iasnaia Poliana, lasting until one of them lost a game of checkers! Dostoevsky never forgave Turgenev’s kindness in lending money when Dostoevsky desperately needed it. Later, the religious writer savaged Turgenev as Karmazinov in the novel translated as The Possessed. Such are the literary rewards of liberal kindness! Suggested Reading: Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times. Ivan Turgenev, First Love.

Lecture 21: From the 1880s onward, Tolstoy became more and more engrossed in the moral and religious problems he saw within and around him. He even went so far as to renounce and condemn his own masterpieces as vain incense burned at a false altar. Even then, however, he defined art marvelously as the “chut’ chut’” (that which is barely, barely expressed). In 1886 came The Death of Ivan Il’ich, and in 1891 appeared The Kreutzer Sonata, two masterpieces of the novella form that rivaled both Gogol’ and Dostoevsky. In this period, we see Tolstoy as he was masterfully described by Gorky: “Tolstoy and God are like two bears in the same den.” His home life became increasingly acrimonious, as his wife and most of his seven children started to do battle with the previously great literary artist, who now seemed to be running for the office of God Almighty. The climax came in 1910, when he secretly ran away from wife and home, contracted pneumonia on the train, and died in the stationmaster’s office at the station in Astapovo - in biblical language: “Zekher Tsaddik L’v’rokhoh” (“The memory of the righteous is for blessing”). Suggested Reading: R. F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction. Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy.

Lecture 20: In contrast to the parody and tragedy of the Oblonskys and the Karenins, we see genuine and healthy conjugal life, with all of its attending stresses and joys, destined to last a lifetime. This destiny we observe as the result of the marriage of Kitty, née Shcherbatskaia, and Konstantin Levin, a character in many ways obviously related to his creator, Tolstoy. The novelist’s first name is close to the character’s family name; the proposal of marriage repeats verbatim the word game Tolstoy used in his own proposal to Sofiia Bers. Perhaps most important, Levin’s final religious conversion, or epiphany, parallels Tolstoy’s own—which we know will be as temporary; Tolstoy could never stop searching. As Isaiah Berlin put it brilliantly: Tolstoy was born to be a fox, an animal who runs far and wide over the fields; he desperately wanted to become a hedgehog, an animal that remains with one overwhelming insight and defense. Anna Karenina magnificently and profoundly shows this truth and this agony. Suggested Reading: Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox.

Lecture 19: After the publication of War and Peace, with fame and controversy raging over his head, Tolstoy turned to the creation of another manuscript, written between 1873 and 1877. It deals, in a way, with the opposite of healthy family life, the theme of adultery. First, in the case of the Oblonsky household, Tolstoy deals with it lightly, ironically, using the title protagonist, Anna Karenina, to bring the family back together. Then, Anna’s own adultery, with Count Vronsky, brings a more savage tone, appropriate to the biblical reference (Epistle to the Romans, 12:19) quoted in part as the title of this lecture: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall requite.” Tolstoy pulls off something few writers can achieve. He writes a comic parody that makes fun of his own tragic center of the novel: Steve Oblonsky’s comically related adultery in contrast to the tragedy of Anna Karenina’s. He also manages to present a woman as seen through the eyes of other women: Kitty and Dolly, both of the Shcherbatsky family. I know of no other male writer who ever successfully managed that psychological leap. Suggested Reading: Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, with an introduction by W. Gareth Jones. Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy’s Major Fiction.

Lecture 17: After the young Tolstoy settled down to domestic life, at the famous estate at Iasnaia Poliana, he used his military experience, his reading of Stendhal, and his wife, Sofiia Andreevna née Bers, to great purpose. Between 1865 and 1869, he wrote and rewrote a 1,500-page novel about warfare and its effect on family life. His wife recopied the manuscript seven times! Starting out to write about the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, he pushed back to the events of 1801 and 1802, then went forward to the great Napoleonic invasion of 1812. The magnificent St. Petersburg, so elevated by Pushkin and Dostoevsky, was now presented as the cold city of bureaucrats and power-seekers, enlivened only by a young man, Pierre Bezukhov, who clashed with the norms of aristocratic society. We then see the contrasting city of Moscow, the home of the marvelously warm Rostov family, followed by the Bolkonsky estate out in the Russian countryside. The Bolkonsky family shows the order coming out of the 18th-century French Enlightenment, leavened by the true Christianity and luminous eyes of Princess Mariia Bolkonskaia. Suggested Reading: Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace.” Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace.

Lecture 18: What happens when good family people with rich domestic experience meet the hideous bloodshed of a massive war, the most massive one Europe had known up to the year 1812? How did Napoleon’s Grande Armée affect the nation with the largest land mass in the world? Tolstoy shows us how through his extraordinary characters. Nikolai Rostov, the young man filled with sincere patriotism, seeks glorious death for the sake of the tsar and the fatherland. But when the French soldiers shoot at him, he wonders why anyone would want to kill such a nice person as himself. Andrei Bolkonsky discovers the nature of true courage and fortitude, plus the blue sky over the Battle of Austerlitz. This discovery is intensified at the Battle of Borodino, paradigm of all modern mass battles, from Gettysburg to Stalingrad. And a great deal of this experience is seen through the eyes of the loveliest feminine creature in 19th-century literature, whom no one can resist loving: Natasha Rostova. Suggested Reading: John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel.

Lecture 16: In the large novels by Tolstoy, the reader often feels as if he or she is entering an entire universe. Although this is undoubtedly an exaggeration, there is something God-like about the massiveness and the life-giving quality of Tolstoy’s writing. His life spans almost the whole period of highest Russian literary creativity. His opinions cover a vast range of Russian and human affairs, yet he can also be concerned with the smallest and most banal details of everyday family life. This dichotomy is perhaps best summed up in the beginning of his second great novel, Anna Karenina: “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. All was confusion in the Oblonsky household.” This literary giant lost his mother at an early age and his father not much later. He was thrown out of the University of Kazan’, and he partook in the fighting of the Crimean War in 1854–1855. His first work was a remarkable account of childhood, adolescence, and youth; shortly thereafter, he published an account of the long and bloody battle for the city of Sevastopol’, which controls the sea access to Crimea. A Siberian prisoner was deeply impressed by the writing of the young man. That prisoner’s name was F. M. Dostoevsky. Suggested Reading: Lev Tolstoy, Tales of Army Life, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Lev Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, translated and with an introduction by Michael Scammell. T. G. S. Cain, Tolstoy.

Lecture 15: Dostoevsky replies to the problems posed by the Grand Inquisitor with the teachings of the elder, Father Zosima. Alyosha tries to follow these precepts and ends up close to a loss of faith, saved by Grushen’ka, the one who is supposed to be an infernal woman. Ivan has his famous interview with an ironic devil who deals all too succinctly with the intellectual’s problems. The whole affair is interrupted and then completed with Dmitrii’s trial, where the wrong person is convicted for a murder whose real culprit we readers have met through Ivan’s interviews with Smerdiakov. The final statement of the novel comes through Alyosha’s sermon at the gravestone of a young boy who has died. He leaves us at the edge of a hint about the reality of Christian resurrection, while the author leaves us a virtually unmatched literary masterpiece. Suggested Reading: Robert Belknap, The Genesis of the Brothers Karamazov. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–81, vol. 5.

Lecture 14: Throughout the 1870s, Dostoevsky became ever more deeply obsessed with what the Russians called “the eternal questions”: the relationship between the eternal human desire for freedom and the desire for love; the wellsprings of human attachment and, equally, human hate; the problem of passing on humankind’s greatest achievements from one generation to another. Underlying all these issues lay the question of God’s existence and his order in the universe. In the process of wrestling with these problems, Dostoevsky created the Karamazov family, whose lives, passions, and lusts vividly grasped the creative imagination not only of the 19th century but of many centuries to come. Dmitrii Karamazov, the sensualist among the brothers, puts it very succinctly: “In this world there is nothing higher than the ideal of the Madonna, and nothing lower than the Karamazov conscience.” Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual, puts forward the greatest doubts that puzzle the Christian believer. Suggested Reading: Fedor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Robert L. Jackson, ed., A New Word on the Brothers Karamazov.

Lecture 13: The tortured mind and heart of the intelligent young criminal leads us through the gallery of psychological doubles, mates to various sides of Raskol’nikov’s fractured personality: Svidrigailov, the apogee of evil and malice, who yet turns out to have a better side; Sonya, a young girl forced into prostitution to support her family, uses the great Russian version of the New Testament to push Raskol’nikov in a very different direction, toward salvation; Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating prosecutor looms like an almost supernatural doom over the protagonist, yet offers a kind of legal salvation in the end. All of them, together with other penetrating psychological portraits, make Crime and Punishment a conflagration of passions and arguments that hypnotize the reader. Suggested Reading: Joseph Frank, DostoevskyThe Miraculous Years, 1865–71, vol. 4.

Lecture 11: Shortly after Dostoevsky’s auspicious beginnings, Belinsky hurt the young man deeply by sharply rejecting The Double. The author then drifted into a mildly revolutionary circle of moderate liberals. In 1848, early in the morning, he was awakened by the tsar’s police and placed under arrest. In December of 1849, he was led, together with his fellow liberals, out into the bitter St. Petersburg cold, under sentence of execution by firing squad. At the very last second, the soldiers lowered their rifles, and the condemned men heard a prearranged tsarist stay of execution. The young writer served four years in chains, working in a Siberian prison camp. This experience received much literary treatment in his subsequent work. After marrying a widow in Siberia, he returned to European Russia in 1859. The marriage was an uneasy one, and his first wife died. In 1864, with her corpse, according to Russian custom, still on the table, he wrote one of his most disturbing, moving, and penetrating works: a novella, Notes from the Underground. If you read it and then sleep normally for the next week, you have not read it properly. The Underground Man, a compendium of everything deep within ourselves that we try to hide but know all too well, makes an impassioned and embittered cry for human freedom but without human joy and love. Suggested Reading: Fedor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett and revised by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Robert L. Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature; a dissenting, critical view of Dostoevsky.

Lecture 12: In the 1860s, Dostoevsky got himself out of a dangerous snare with his publisher, thanks to the help of a young woman stenographer, Anna Grigor’evna Snitkina, who took not only his dictation but also his proposal for marriage. Subsequently, she played no small role in the production of the world’s greatest novels. Dostoevsky was long fascinated by human foibles, especially the habit of alcoholism. He decided to deal with this problem in a novel called P’ianen’kie (The Dear Little Drunkards), but his main character, a certain Marmeladov (notice the jelly in the man’s name) met a young, troubled student named Raskol’nikov (literally, “from among the schismatics”). The resulting murderous and inflamingly introspective journey became the world-famous Crime and Punishment. In the beginning, we see a St. Petersburg quite far from Pushkin’s glorious creation of Peter. We see a crowded tenement, whose banisters are covered with sticky eggshells, and canals that stink when their levels go down in an unusually hot summer. Suggested Reading: Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Norton Critical Edition of the novel, with commentary by critics espousing different points of view.

Lecture 10: There is probably no writer since the Renaissance who has made a deeper impression on contemporary imagination and creativity than Dostoevsky, with the possible exception of his great contemporary, Tolstoy. (Let it only be said that it was Dostoevsky who forced the creator of this lecture series, at the age of 19, to learn the magnificent Russian language.) Dostoevsky was the son of a military Russian doctor in Moscow. He grew up in the city, and he did not partake of the great rural culture of Russia. Educated as an engineer but desperately in love with French and Russian literature, he wrote an epistolary novel, Poor Folk, in 1844, which he submitted to a prestigious journal. Its famous editor, Nekrasov, gave it to Belinsky (shades of Gogol’), who only grudgingly agreed to read the work of some nerdy engineer. Belinsky became totally engrossed in its artistry, swallowed the work whole, went to Dostoevsky’s apartment at 4:00 in the morning, embraced him, and declared the young man the future genius of Russia. Dostoevsky later wrote: “That was one of the rare moments in my life when I was truly happy.” The novel itself concerned not only the difficult life of Russian poor people but also many of the themes that Dostoevsky later elaborated. Suggested Reading: Fedor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk. Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work.

Lecture 9: Gogol’ was a tremendously restless person. Right after his success as a playwright, he set off for Western Europe, where his memories of rural Russia, filtered through his half-crazy imagination, produced an unforgettable series of grotesque and comic characters under the deceptive title of Dead Souls. Despite its morbid-sounding title, the novel gives a fascinating picture of a Russian plut (“rogue”), Chichikov. The very sibilant repetition in the name tells a great deal. In his rickety yet mighty troika, Chichikov slithers his way through the Russian provincial gentry, with a wondrously crooked plan, more than worthy of any world-class shyster. Later, Gogol’ tried to bring his rogue to virtue, with a lack of success that was clearly predictable: Paradise was not for this inveterate denizen of hell. Gogol’ did manage to irritate mightily his erstwhile friends and readers. A short time after receiving a missive from the great critic Belinsky, a letter that would have torn the hide off a hog, Gogol’ died with leeches hanging from his magnificent nose. Suggested Reading: Nikolai Gogol’, Dead Souls (a novel called a “poem”), with commentary at the end of the Norton edition. Francis B. Randall, Vissarion Belinsky.

Lecture 8: Partly contemporary with Pushkin came the first great master of Russian prose, a man with a long, prominent nose that he immortalized in literature. Born in Ukraine, brought up with the rich folklore and devilish tales of that rich western region of the tsar’s empire, Gogol’ came to the capital in 1828, the year of Tolstoy’s birth. After a short, spectacularly unsuccessful career as a teacher, in 1836, he wrote a play, The Inspector General, whose performances attracted enormous attention among Russian spectators and readers, not least of all from Tsar Nikolai I. The play’s off-center sense of humor, combined with its bitingly mordant presentation of Russian corruption and civic disorder, made an impression that has lasted for 180 years with undiminished strength. Five years after writing the play, Gogol’ wrote one of the greatest masterpieces of the European novella form - The Overcoat. This portrayal of the travails experienced by a low-ranking St. Petersburg copyist and bureaucrat, a sort of human typewriter, has captured the sympathies and imagination of countless generations. Suggested Reading: Nikolai Gogol’, The Inspector General. Nikolai Gogol’, The Nose, The Overcoat, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, translated and with an introduction by Ronald Wilks. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol.

Lecture 7: Pushkin was well aware that Russian greatness and power were built on the suffering and labor of tens of millions of serfs and lower-class, urban serving people. In his narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, he contrasts the most famous invocation to the beauty of St. Petersburg—known as well by Russians as we know Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”—with the misery of those who live and perish under the yoke of Russia’s imperial establishment. Later, not long before his death, he erects his own monument, “not touchable by human hands,” to be admired by countless future Russian generations. In 1837, Pushkin, who felt he had to live in Russian high society, perished from a blow brought about by the Byzantine turnings of that same society. A French officer serving in the Russian army, Georges d’Anthès, virtually stalked Pushkin’s beautiful wife, Natalia. Pushkin’s enraged reactions, and a nasty anonymous letter, led to a duel that ended with a bullet in the poet’s abdomen and a hideously painful deatha death that Russia mourns to this very day. Suggested Reading: John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary. Ilya Kutik, Writing as ExorcismThe Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol. Aleksandr Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman in Pushkin Threefold, poems translated by Walter Arndt.

Lecture 6: Pushkin was well aware, perhaps even immodestly so, of his extraordinary gifts; he often contrasted and compared them with the talents of other artists. In his earlier writings, he turned to Mozart: a genius, like Pushkin, who was often able spontaneously, without extensive labors or revisions, to pour out his talent in written notes, producing marvelous melodies and rhythms. Antonio Salieri, by contrast, labored within all the rules of harmony. The result was a clash of temperaments, which led, as legend had it, to Salieri’s murder of Mozart, “for the good of music” no less! Pushkin’s short drama Mozart and Salieri echoes that legend, as does Peter Shaffer’s play and film Amadeus. Later in his career, Pushkin looked with admiration at the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. The result was a brilliant novella, Egyptian Nights, in which a character, in many ways like Pushkin himself, was the lesser talent, looking on as the gifted foreign improviser worked his magic on the glitterati of St. Petersburg. Suggested Reading: Aleksandr Pushkin, Egyptian Nights. Aleksandr Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri. Aleksandr Pushkin, The Complete Prose Fiction, translation and commentary by Paul Debreczeny. Aleksandr Pushkin, The Poems, Prose, and Plays of Alexander Pushkin, edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Peter Shaffer, Amadeus, a play and a film.