Beyond the Wooden Curtain

PUSHKIN AND RUSSIAN LITERATURE (226 pp.)--Janko Lavrin--Macmillan ($2).

"You have no idea," wrote the great Russian poet Pushkin to a friend, "how nice it is to run away from one's fiancee and to write verses. Oh my dear, what joy!" In that autumn of 1830, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin wrote an astonishing number of lyrics, short plays and stories, some of which for more than a century have been proclaimed masterpieces. When he returned to Moscow, he married his cold, beautiful Natalia (by his own count she was woman No. 113 in his life), but only three years later he was writing to the attractive wife of the Austrian Ambassador: "I am created to love you and to follow you. Any other preoccupation on my part is either blundering about or sheer madness."

Six years after his marriage, annoyed by his brother-in-law's attentions to his wife (Czar Nicholas I flirted with her too), Pushkin challenged him to a duel, was wounded and died two days later. The stocky, cocky little wencher was only 38, but already Russia's No. 1 literary man. To this day many Russians, both red and white, are agreed that he still is.

Pushkin, though he was only a mild liberal, has been claimed by the Soviets as "the forefather of the Russian revolution." In the year 1936 alone, 13 million copies of his books and books about him were published throughout the Soviet Union.

Trouble for Translators. U.S. readers have had to take his quality mostly on faith. The greatness of Russian writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov shines through the dark glass of translation. But poetry is a different matter, and Poet Pushkin, by common consent of his critics, seems stripped of his genius when tackled by English translators. According to Critic Edmund Wilson, Pushkin was greater than Keats or Byron. At its translated worst, his verse is no more than disjointed doggerel; at its best it is a vigorous, resourceful blend of realism and Byronic romanticism consistently spoiled by poetic cliches. Sample lines, from The Bronze Horseman, called by Critic D. S. Mirsky probably the greatest of all Russian poems:

1 love thee, city of Peter's making; 1 love thy harmonics austere, And Neva's sovran waters breaking Along her banks of granite sheer . . .

Now, city of Peter, stand thou fast, Foursquare, like Russia; vaunt thy splendor! The very element shall surrender And make her peace with thee at last.

Sources for Successors. The latest champion of Pushkin's untranslatable greatness is Janko Lavrin, professor of Slavonic literature at England's University College at Nottingham. Lavrin cites the debt owed to Pushkin by Russian writers and musicians: Gogol frankly borrowed ideas from the "Russian Shakespeare"; Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov were based on works of Pushkin. But until a major poet comes along who can hear well in Russian and sing well in English, the recurring accolades will continue to mystify plain U.S. readers. Pushkin once observed: "Poetry, may God forgive me, must be slightly stupid"--but not so stupid as his translators make it appear.

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