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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
During the spring and summer months of 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin intensified his efforts to end his exile in Mikhailovskoe. Though his friends urged him to produce work that might influence imperial opinion in his favor, Pushkin doubted that his poems could win him freedom. His writings increasingly were concerned with what the function of poetry should be. Pushkin's “crisis” in 1825 turned not only on political issues (the Decembrist revolt at the end of the year upset him greatly) but also on literary decisions. Politics and poetry are intertwined in one of the most problematic poems of that year, “André Chénier.” A poem now virtually forgotten, “André Chénier” shows Pushkin working out a formula for asserting his independence as a poet which was to organize his poetics for years to come.
The French poet André Chénier (1762–1794) was seen in the 1820s as an impassioned champion of political liberty who had been martyred for his ideals during the French Revolution. His poetry has strong formal and thematic ties to the classical tradition. Critics then as now have wavered between calling Chénier a neoclassical poet and the first romantic poet. Pushkin and his contemporaries were struck by the fresh diction and large sweep of Chénier's poems. Because Chénier's poetry was suppressed after his death, the publication in 1819 of the first collection of his verse made him seem suddenly contemporary, all the more so since his ideas were consonant with those of free-thinking Russian aristocratic circles of the time.
1. Pushkin responded with disbelief to letters from friends suggesting that Boris Godunov might bring about his release; see Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad, 1939-1949), 13:172–73, 271Google Scholar. Among Pushkin's answers, the letter to P. A. Viazemskii, in which Pushkin compares himself to his Holy Fool, his ears sticking out of any conventional political cap, is the best known. See Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS) (Leningrad, 1977-1979), 10:144–45Google Scholar. This, the most recent Academy edition of Pushkin, will be cited by volume and page number. References to the poem “André Chénier” are given in parentheses by line. All English translations are my own.
2. Chénier's English biographer judges him to be strongly neoclassical; see Francis, Scarfe, André Chénier: His Life and Work (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar. The introduction to his works in French takes a less firm stand but notes that he is usually seen as the first romantic. See Chénier, André, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1950), xxxiii Google Scholar.
3. V. B. Sandomirskaia outlines Pushkin's general interest in Chenier in “Perevody i perelozheniia Pushkina iz Shen'e, A., Pushkin. Issledovaniia i material) (Leningrad, 1978) 8:90–106 Google Scholar.
4. An easily available source for Pushkin's ideas about romanticism is John Mersereau, Jr.'s study “Pushkin's Concept of Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism, 3, no. 1 (Autumn, 1963): 23-41. In Pushkin's essays, the central text is the drafted work on classical and romantic poetry (7:24-26) written, significantly, in 1825.
5. PSS, 10:75-76.
6. Ibid., 7:352-53.
7. Chénier, Oeuvres complètes, p. 127.
8. Some excellent research exists on the precise dating of “André Chénier.” The issue is not without importance because 44 lines which were censored from Chénier's first speech were then circulated separately with the words “December 14” written across the top. As Pushkin pointed out in his own defense when the matter nearly came to public attention in 1828, the poem was completed months before the Decembrist uprising. See Sandomirskaia, V. B., “Andre Shen'e,” Stikhotvoreniia A. Pushkina 1820-1830—kh godov (Leningrad, 1974), pp. 14–18 Google Scholar; and Eidel'man, N., Pushkin i dekabristy (Moscow, 1979), pp. 314–27 Google Scholar.
9. PSS, 2:231.
10. Francis, Scarfe, André Chénier, pp. 326–35Google Scholar.
11. Zhirmunskii's, Viktor study Bairon i Pushkin, recently republished (Leningrad, 1978)Google Scholar, still offers the clearest analysis of Pushkin's encounter with Byron as one facet of his struggle with romanticism.
12. PSS, 2:231.
13. Ibid., 10:107.
14. Ibid., 2:231.
15. Compare Cooke, Michael's Acts of Inclusion (New Haven, Ct., 1979), pp. 12–18 Google Scholar, where he theorizes that elegy and prophecy take up the same essential content during the romantic period.
16. Compare the much-discussed closing of Boris Godunov. Pushkin ultimately removed the people's rousing cheers for the new Tsar Dmitrii and left only the comment “Narod bezmolvstvuet“ (“The people are silent“) as an implicit condemnation of the pretender's reign. An interesting article on this changed ending is M. P. Alekseev's “Remarka Pushkina ‘Narod bezmolvstvuet,'” reprinted in his Pushkin. Sravnitel'no-istoricheskie issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1972), pp. 208-39. All subsequent commentators follow Alekseev's conclusion that the people's silence demonstrates their awareness that their lot has not been improved by the change in rulers.
17. On Pushkin's consistent use of the caesura in his hexametric line, see Bondi, S, “Pushkin i russkii gekzametr,” O Pushkine (Moscow, 1978), pp. 310–71 Google Scholar.
18. See L. P. Grossman, “Pushkin i Andre Shen'e,” reprinted in his Pushkin. Etiudy o Pushkine (Moscow, 1928), pp. 194-96, for a discussion of images borrowed from Chénier.
19. Boris Tomashevskii argues that the images are more from Pushkin's own early lyrics than from Chénier in his Pushkin. Kniga vtoraia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961), p. 71. Both he and Grossman, as well as Sandomirskaia and Eidel'man in the essays cited above, have observed that Pushkin's metrical openness and stylistic informality were qualities learned from Chénier
20. Batiushkov, K. N., Opyty v stikhakh iproze (St. Petersburg, 1817 Google Scholar) reprinted in the “Literaturnyi pamiatnik” series (Moscow, 1977), pp. 325-33.
21. V. B. Sandomirskaia, “Andre Shen'e,” p. 18, lists other “prison poems” written during the period, but she concludes that they also go back to Batiushkov for the basic model.
22. PSS, 7:390-411.
23. Boris Godunov, the fourth chapter of Evgenii Onegin, and “André Chénier” are all found in a single notebook, along with the poems “la byl svidetelem zlatoi tvoei vesny” (“I was witness to your golden spring“), “Segodnia bal u Satana” (“Today is a ball at Satan's“), and the imagined conversation with Alexander I. Comparisons of these works, for instance Eidel'man's Pushkin i dekabristy, emphasize the political connections among them.
24. PSS, 7:37.
25. Ibid., 10:148.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 2:7-8.
28. Ibid., 7:24, 37.
29. Nikolai, Grech, Uchebnaia kniga russkoi slovesnosti (St. Petersburg, 1830), 3:160 Google Scholar.
30. Laharpe, J. F., Cours de la litterature ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1816), 1:594 Google Scholar.
31. PSS, 10:144.
32. Ibid., 2:250.
33. Ibid., 10:90, 135, 210.
34. See especially Evgenii Onegin, 4:31-33. Pushkin wrote chapter 4 in 1825, again in the same notebook mentioned above (n. 23).
35. Examples are too numerous to cite in the text. Among them: 7:59-60, 81, 118, 153, 165, 184, 205, 244, 287; 10:36, 58, 314.
36. PSS, 7:36.
37. Nikolai, Grech, Uchebnaia kniga russkoi slovesnosti, 3:34 Google Scholar.
38. Boris Tomashevskii has written about the “hybrid elegy” in Pushkin's time. See especially his “Strofika Pushkina,” Stikh i iazyk (Moscow-Leningrad, 1959), p. 265. Compare the recent textbook by Fridman, N. B., Romantizm v tvorchestve A. S. Pushkina (Moscow, 1980), pp. 33–34 Google Scholar, where “André Chénier” is viewed in the traditional way as a historical elegy, though Fridman cites many of the same facts which have caused me here to move away from that belief.
39. PSS, 5:78-79.
40. Ibid., 7:411.
41. See Fridman, , Romantizm v tvorchestve A. S. Pushkina, pp. 32–34Google Scholar. Fridman finds a poet's choice of historical subjects over contemporary themes typical of the romantic urge toward escape. Compare L. S. Fleishman, “Iz istorii elegit v pushkinskuiu epokhu,” Pushkinskii sbornik (Riga, 1968), pp. 31-35.
42. PSS, 7:51-62.
43. Ibid., 10:370.
44. Ibid., 10:94; compare ibid., 10:98, 363.
45. Ibid., 10:98.
46. V., Veresaev, Pushkin v zhizni (Moscow, 1936), 2:232Google Scholar.
