Tag Archives: Pushkin

The Madman’s Self-Deception

Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” both feature protagonists who descend into madness while chasing such morally empty objectives as lust, respect, and fortune. Throughout the path to their eventual insanity and institutionalization for insanity, the symptoms of madness present themselves in a way that degrades the subjects. Madness is not a wild release for the protagonists in this story; it is much more of a reminder of the realities that Aksenty in “Diary of a Madman” and Hermann in “The Queen of Spades” are dissatisfied with. In fact, while Aksenty and Hermann lose their grip on reality through the distortion of insanity, their self-deception also reinforces their position in reality in cruel fashion .

Arksenty Ivanovich Poprischin is a social servant who aims to achieve power and dignity even though he greatly underachieves. He places the blame for this on his boss, the Section Chief, yet  he also sees a path to liberation through the Section Chief’s daughter, Sophie. Arksenty falls in love with her, comparing her to a little bird with whom he could cast aside his personal insecurities. Arksenty’s madness eventually conceives of a dog who writes letters. Arksenty reads the letters, and they reveal Arksenty’s irrelevance to Sophie, her love with another man, and general insults about Arksenty’s appearance. If these letters are an invention of Arksenty’s crazed mind, why do they further degrade him? Even if the letters had been real, his madness now supplies an innocent, objective figure (Madgie the dog) to deliver insults to Aksenty. Either way, the letters seem to reinforce his position of irrelevance which he hopes to transcend. In this way, Arksenty’s madness misleads his ultimate goals by delegitimizing them.

In Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” Hermann also misleads himself in the midst of his obsession with discovering the secret of the card game fero. Hermann feigns love for Lizaveta in order to chase an empty and corrupt wealth. He wants to gain access to the countess’ secrets that were born out of necessity and gifted to the countess only to alleviate her from poverty. After his armed appearance shocks the countess to death, Hermann’s mad consciousness punishes Hermann for his shallowness; the wink of the countess’ corpse and her appearance as a ghost to reveal the card game secret only pit Hermann against himself. He misleads himself into thinking that he possesses a secret, and then through this arrogance he loses his final card game and goes insane.

Madness, through all of its distortions, imprisons the protagonists in their own sad realities in these stories. This raises some questions: Is this punishment for their moral shallowness? If so, why is such a punishment self-inflicted, and what does it say about the way Russian society viewed insanity?

What is “Old” Is New Again

As I myself have written at length about, Russian culture is obsessed with the idea of itself. The Russian nation’s identity is inexorably tied with its self perception, perhaps to an unhealthy level. In the 1800s, introspective pondering took maximum hold over the nation’s psyche. Russia found herself finally with a rich, unified history to look back on, and from which to derive a “Russian” identity. 500, 400, and 300 years beforehand, the direct impact and remnants of the Mongol occupancy were too fresh for Russia’s arts and culture to flourish in a self-derivative way, unconscious of their bastard influences. Before Muscovy united the lands east of the current Baltic states, and until that event was in not-recent memory, the singular Russian cultural focus of “Russian-ness” couldn’t be pursued.

Tchaikovsky’s seminal ballet Swan Lake (1875) represents an era of culture that would have been impossible hundreds of years prior. The great artists of the 1800s, (Tchaikovsky and Pushkin included) drew heavily on a Russian folk tradition that emerged after the solidification of a singular Russian state. The plot of Swan Lake is derived mostly from Russian folktales, just as Pushkin’s epic poem Ruslan and Liudmila is. Pushkin uses devices and imagery extremely reminiscent of folktales to craft a distinct story that is absolutely separate from any of its influences. Pushkin builds a poem that has a folktale-like framework, one that would be familiar to any adult in the 19th century from their childhood. In Swan Lake, the choreography is very similar to the basic structure of the Moiseyev ensemble dances. Extended sections of Swan Lake feature male and female dancers in front of a gender-balanced ensemble. This pairing by gender, as well as the basic ensemble structure is very alike when compared to the folk dancing. Musically, Swan Lake has many folk influences as well. Some melody lines in the ballet are starkly simple, giving reminder to the homophonic, almost monophonic Russian folk music. Often a single voice (melody line) dances above a drone-like, semi-static accompaniment. This is also a motif evident in Swan Lake.

Learning to Settle

I really enjoyed Sophie’s discussion of the fairytales in her post — her arguments resonated with me. The tales were my favorite of the core work for this week because they left me analyzing society in the deepest way (which is a tad ironic, I think). Our class discussions were great, and I’m still left pondering the cultural reasoning behind the stories’ nature. Though they weren’t quite as shocking as Frol Skobeev, they were nowhere near as watered down and painfully unrealistic as the Hollywood “Happily Ever After”, and they strayed from the typical religious undertones of prayer and suffering leading to salvation. Instead, these strange tales echoed themes of fated situations of strife — usually familial — in which protagonists invoked the help of magical creatures. Tsarevich Ivan and the Grey Wolf piqued my interest the most, though, because the moral seems to read: “if you’re going to misbehave, misbehave well.” Tsarevich Ivan must appease his father (by and large the greatest consistency through all the stories) by stealing; and yet, when his siblings steal his spoils (as he did) AND quite literally murder him, the happy ending is the reversal. The grey wolf revives him, he returns home, and his ending is cold and emotionless: “Tsarevich Ivan told him [Tsar Berendei] how the Grey Wolf had helped him, and how his brothers had killed him while he slept and Grey Wolf had torn them to bits. At first Tsar Berendei was sorely grieved, but he soon got over it,” (54). I laughed when I read that, because it’s absolutely ridiculous, and yet, it pokes fun at fratricide, great expectations, and settling into stealing when you must. The moral compromises of this tale were far more satisfying to me than everyone turning out A-OK in the end. As Pushkin says in his dedication for Ruslan and Liudmila, “And no one’s praises do I ask from fate, but shall be pleased to thank it”… The Russians know how to settle into a less-than-splendid situation when push comes to shove.

What’s in a Name? Ontological Crisis!

Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is a masterpiece-the trouble is that it, like any masterpiece, has far too much worth unpacking for this humble blog post to cover. I will start with a small detail; I will enter through the servant’s door, Frol Skobeev’s coin jingling in my petticoats.

Throughout the poem, St. Petersburg is called by four different names. In the third stanza of the Prologue, it is Petra tvoren’e (creation of Peter), in the sixth stanza it is grad Petrov (city of Peter). In the first stanza of Part 1 it is Petrograd (Peter-city), in the fourth it is Petropol’ (Petropolis). With each name change, her aspect changes as well- from a strict and beautifully-ordered object of love, to the unshakeable death-knell for the elements, back to a November-kissed darkened city, and finally (and most dramatically) to ‘Triton, immersed up to the waist.’ The city is mutable and protean, stamped with Peter’s mark, yet failing to settle into one shape.

The effect of this on the reader (this reader, to be precise) is one of untethering. Pushkin gives us a poetic description of the city in the Introduction, but without a stable identity to pin it on, both the description and the city seem to escape the realm of the concrete. The city is a spatial non-sequitur, and only when the flood comes, bringing with it human tragedy and the destruction of concrete physical objects, can she be pinned down and transformed into a backdrop for small-scale grief-it is significant that St. Petersburg is given no further names in Part 2 of the poem, as Evgenii contemplates his loss and slips into madness.

Is it any wonder, then, that Petersburg has developed around itself a myth of unreality, that for Herzen it “disappears from my eyes in the fog”, unique and elusive in being “the embodiment of the general abstract notion of a capital city”? The idea of St. Petersburg being an ‘unreal city’ is not my own-it is a complex (and fascinating!) cultural trope, which we will discuss next class. It is interesting, however, to observe the small tweaks in language that can buttress this unreality-a syllable here, an allusion there, and St. Petersburg recedes into the night…*
*Read Andrei Bely’s Petersburg for this and more.

Success Without Absolute Merit

Although the opera Boris Gudonov is now regarded as one of, if not the greatest, in the Russian canon, it was initially panned. Although the drama is a remarkable, complex tale of opportunism and the failings of human political systems, and has long been acknowledged as such, the opera’s score has come under harsh criticism since Gudonov‘s premier. Originally written and composed by Modest Mussorgsky, noted member of the “Mighty Handful” group of nationalistic Russian composers, the score was torn apart by critics for its “weak harmonies”. Incredibly, it was later re-worked by another member of the “Mighty Handful”, Nicholai Rimsky-Korsakov, in a fairly successful attempt to right the thinly-orchestrated areas of Gudonov‘s original Mussorgsky score. Some of the errors in Mussorgsky original work are plainly evident, even to the relatively untrained ear. One minute into Act 4, Scene 2 (second excerpt), the harmony is stark and ugly, not aiding or benefiting the soloist’s melody line.

Shostakovich also reworked Gudonov, completing a veritable who’s who of Russian classical composers (with Tchaikovsky the notable exception). Although Mussorgsky has many musical accomplishments, including Night on Bald Mountain, Boris Gudonov is clearly not within that number. The success of the opera is solely based on Pushkin’s drama, which was the framework for the plot. Although a fantastic opera, it may be very well best absorbed with a score that is not original.