И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата. Сборник статей
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David M. Bethea
Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds
Personality and Verbal Play in Pushkin’s Lyceum Verse
Pushkin’s biographers have often pointed out that the Lyceum played a special role in the poet’s psychic development, as a place (and a time) where a troubled youth’s better angels could be appealed to and where lifelong friendships based on shared experience and bonds of trust could be cemented.1 From Annenkov to Lotman to Bin yon, these six years of structure and routine become the “family life” that the young Pushkin did not have at home with Sergei Lvovich and Nadezhda Osipovna: “Nam tselyi mir chuzhbina;/ Otechestvo nam Tsarskoe Selo.” But the Lyceum was crucial to Pushkin’s development in another respect: it was a place that lent itself almost magically to poetical musing. As we learn from the famous opening to chapter 8 of Eugene Onegin:
В те дни, когда в садах Лицея
Я безмятежно расцветал,
Читал охотно Апулея,
А Цицерона не читал,
В те дни в таинственных долинах,
Весной, при кликах лебединых,
Близ вод, сиявших в тишине,
Являться муза стала мне.
Моя студенческая келья
Вдруг озарилась; муза в ней
Открыла пир младых затей,
Воспела детские веселья,
И славу нашей старины,
И сердца трепетные сны.
[In days when I still bloomed serenely
Inside our Lycée garden wall
And read my Apuleius keenly,
But read no Cicero at all —
Those springtime days in secret valleys,
Where swans call and beauty dallies,
Near waters sparkling in the still,
The Muse first came to make me thrill.
My student cell turned incandescent;
And there the Muse spread out for me
A feast of youthful fancies free,
And sang of childhood effervescent,
The glory of our days of old,
The trembling dreams the heart can hold.]2
The valleys that are “secret, mysterious” (tainstvennye) because they first gave birth to private reverie; the lakes and the swans (swans being a Derzhavinian metaphor for poetry to Pushkin and his Lyceum mates); the Apuleius whose adventure stories and sexual license are much more the attractive forbidden fruit for these teenagers than stern Cicero; the notion of withdrawal into the gardens (“v sadakh”) and into the student cell (kel’ia) that somehow miraculously opens out into an illumination called the Muse – all this is integral to the “blooming” (“ia bezmiatezhno rastsvetal”) of the future poet. In the essay to follow I propose to first give a brief sketch of the young Pushkin against the background of his Lyceum experience and then to examine aspects of his earliest attempts at verse in an effort to catch glimpses of the mature poet in the boy wonder. My point is not to raise the status of the juvenilia, but rather to see the latter as the creative laboratory wherein, regardless of initial artistic success or failure, different genre-specific “voice zones” are crystallizing and a consistent uniting lichnosf is coming into view. Pushkin is not yet “Pushkin,” to be sure, but if we look carefully there are moments when he could be. At the same time, the sense of risk that accompanies the adolescent Pushkin’s many and varied challenges to authority provides a “haunted” quality to his play – there will be consequences for his verbal actions – that will be a hallmark of some of his greatest works.
Before getting started let us recall what the eleven-year-old boy Sasha Pushkin first saw when he and Uncle Vasilii L’vovich entered one of the three imposing wrought-iron gates leading to the Great or Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo on 9 October 1811 (OS). However occluded by two centuries of myth-making, the basic facts speak for themselves: the impressionable boy would have seen an architectural and landscape ensemble dazzling not only by Russian, but indeed by European and world standards. The Catherine Palace, the emperor’s summer residence, was an immense three-story Baroque edifice extending more than a football field in length; when viewed from within, its seemingly endless enfilade of parqueted chambers created the impression of a veritable Versailles-like hall of mirrors without the reflecting glass. In the northeast corner of the building was an archway connecting the Lyceum, whose four floors had housed the grand duchesses prior to marriage in Catherine’s time but now were newly renovated for the school, to the palace. Other visual marvels in the immediate vicinity included, some 500 meters to the north, the Quarenghi-designed Alexander Palace, chastely classical where the Catherine Palace was voluptuously baroque, a gift to her favorite grandson and future tsar by Catherine the Great; the Cameron Gallery, a grand arcade constructed by the Scottish architect Charles Cameron that extended southeast from the western end of the Catherine Palace and was elegantly lined with ionic columns interspersed with the busts of the greats from ancient and modern history; the Chinese Pavilion that was part of an elaborate oriental complex; several royal bathhouses inspired by the luxury of Nero and set on a wedding cake of terraces flowing south from the Great Palace; charming combinations of grottos, marble bridges, greenhouses, chapels, theatres, and reception halls; and of course, no less stunning than the architectural landmarks and designed with them in mind, the vast parks, beautifully carved around swan-festooned lakes with miniature islands and dotted here and there with monuments to Russian military victories, that were in the Dutch style during the time of Elizabeth and in the English style during the time of Catherine II. In short, this aestheti-cized space was alive with history and myth. The parks’ meandering paths and viewing sites were the perfect hideouts for a budding versifier.
In the company of his peers young Sasha Pushkin did not immediately stand out for his poetic craft. Numerous Lyceans tried their hands at verse, and of these Aleksei Illichevskii was considered the most promising to start with. Pushkin had two nicknames: the first, and best known, was “Frenchman,” which he earned because of his excellent command of the language, but which another classmate, Modest Korf, suggests may have had a pejorative coloring given the context (the Napoleonic wars). The second was “Mixture of Monkey