p A sharply negative attitude to the theory of art for art’s sake is the largest and strongest of the links that bound Belinsky’s criticism with the criticism of the second half of the fifties and the first half of the sixties. This is why it deserves special attention.

p Our enlighteners could not forgive Pushkin for his contempt of the "vers de terre”, the “rabble”; this alone would have been enough to set them against the great poet. But did they understand Pushkin correctly? Which rabble is he speaking of in his poetry? Belinsky thought that this word meant the popular masses. For Pisarev this opinion became an unshakeable conviction. That is why he answered the poet with such violent passion: "Well, and what about you, the exalted critic, you, the celestial son, what do you cook your food in: pots and pans or a Belvedere idol?... A ver pe terre lives in semi-starvation all the time, but a celestial son acquires a good layer of fat that makes it quite possible for him to create marble gods for himself and spit brazenly in the kitchen pots of his indigent fellow countrymen.” But what is there to suggest that in Pushkin the poet is fulminating against his "indigent fellow countrymen”, precisely the poor people who are half-starving? There is nothing whatsoever to suggest this.

p In the articles and letters of Belinsky himself one frequently comes across attacks on the “rabble” and on the “mob” which does not understand anything sublime. But it would be strange to accuse him on these grounds of having contempt for the poor.  In his Answer to the Anonymous Author Pushkin exclaims:

_p How foolish he who thinks the world will offer
Him sympathy!... Coldly the mob regards a bard; too often
Is he a clown to it....

p Is the word “mob” to be understood here too as meaning the popular masses?

p In a letter to Prince P. A. Vyazemsky (1825) he speaks of the mob as follows: "The mob avidly reads confessions, diaries, etc., because in its baseness it delights in the humiliation of the lofty, the weaknesses of the strong. At the discovery of anything vile it 201 exults: he is small, like us, he is vile, like us! You lie, scoundrels: he is small and vile, but not like you, differently!"

_p Is this mob that avidly reads the confessions and diaries of the great the people? One cannot deny that in Pushkin the indifferent mob is the same as the cold and arrogant people, the obtuse rabble, etc.

p In Eugene Onegin he says that life in high society means living

p Amid the soulless and the vain
The sly, the craven, the inane,
Mid fools that yet aspire to brilliance,
Mid pampered madcaps by the score
And dull and faintly comic villains,
Mid the importunate who bore
Us with their stock of trite opinions,
Mid pious flirts and zealous minions,
Mid fashion’s posturings amid
Polite betrayals safely hid
Behind prim masks’ amid the vicious,
Chill sneers of heartless vanity,
The coldness and vacuity
Of prudent thought and talk judicious....

p What do you think, reader? Do these pious flirts, these soulless and the vain and these fools that yet aspire to brilliance attach great value to the Belvedere idol? We think that they are most indifferent to art and to all idols, except the golden calf. Whence this indifference? After all, the fools that yet aspire to brilliance can hardly plead in their defence oppressive poverty and hard toil which does not leave time for spiritual delights. It is not a matter of poverty here, of course. With Pushkin preference of pots and pans to the Apollo Belvedere simply means the irrelevance of spiritual interests compared to material ones. Pushkin has in mind not only the use value, but also the exchange value of pots and pans. Its exchange value is practically nothing, but the fools that yet aspire to brilliance, the arrogant and cold aristocratic rabble, brought up amid plenty and material delights of all kinds, still cherishes it more than great works of art. This rabble can find a use for pots and pans, yet does not know why these works exist. Is it really right, and the poet who reproaches it for being interested in nothing but profit wrong?

p The idea in the poem "The Rabble" is obviously the same as that in Alfred de Vigny’s drama Chatterton.  In this play an impoverished poet kills himself, certain that he will never have any sympathy from the cold and arrogant rabble around him. And this rabble by no means consists of poor people: young lords who live a life of debauchery, a factory-owner who squeezes the life-blood out 202 of his workers, and the Mayor of London. This revered bourgeois, as we can see, also values pots and pans more than the Belvedere idol; he prudently advises Chatterton to abandon the unprofitable activity of writing poetry and take up some useful work: become a footman. Can accusing a well-fed and complacent Lord Mayor of obtuseness actually mean offending toiling mankind?  [202•* 

p What it is like to live among fools that yet aspire to brilliance can bo seen from the example of Pushkin himself:

p ...they took his former garland
And made him wear a crown of thorns in laurels wrapped;
The hidden thorns which malice hardened
Strung cruelly the forehead they had trapped__^6B

p Everything that we know about Pushkin’s life in the period which began after his Wanderjahre  [202•**  and during which his final views on art were formed shows that there is not the slightest exaggeration in the lines which we have quoted from Lermontov__ Life was terribly hard for Pushkin in the social environment that surrounded him. "The baseness and stupidity of both our capitals is the same, although different in character,” he complains in a letter to P. A. Osipova in the spring of 1827. In January 1828 he again writes to her: "I confess that the noise and bustle of St. Petersburg have become quite alien to me, I endure them with difficulty.” About the same time he wrote the poem "Life, vain gift of chance...” full of despair and the following cheerless lines which Belinsky so often repeated at painful moments of dissatisfaction with himself and the life around him:

p In the world’s wasteland, dolorous and boundless,
Mysteriously have broken forth three springs:
The spring of youth, spring rapid and tumultuous,
Bubbles, runs on, aglitter and agurgle.
The spring of Castaly with swell of inspiration
In the world’s wasteland stills the exiles’ thirst.
The final spring—the cool spring of oblivion,
Slakes the heart’s fever-heat more sweetly still.

p Belinsky says that the poet cannot and should not sing for himself arid about himself. But who can he sing for when no one will listen to him and when people prefer popular ditties to his songs? In such a society he is faced with the choice of either rejecting the vain and chance gift of life and slaking his heart’s fever-heat 203 in the spring of oblivion, i.e., acting as Chatterton did, or singing for himself and for the select few who value art as art and not as a means of winning the favour of a high-ranking patron or as yet another topic for the empty gossip of the salon.

p Pisarev is angered by the fact that Pushkin’s poet scornfully rejects the mob’s invitation to sing for its moral reformation, to preach morality to it. But there is morality and morality. How did Pisarev know what was the morality of the mob talking to the poet? The above-mentioned Lord Mayor and factory-owner from Chatterton would also have approved greatly of a poet who undertook to preach their morality, but before doing so he would have had to stifle the finest aspirations of his heart. Therefore, we confess, it would not have upset us in the slightest if he had replied proudly to them:

p Begone, ye pharisees! What cares
The peaceful poet for your fate?
Go, boldly steep yourselves in sin:
With you the lyre will bear no weight.^^68^^

p Pushkin was often invited to write edifying works designed to extol his country. He preferred “pure” art and thereby showed himself to be above the trite morality of his day.

p People ask why Pushkin should seek out an environment with which he had nothing in common. This is the same question that Belinsky put in connection with Chatsky. We would reply to it by asking another question: what social stratum at that time was superior in its moral and intellectual development to high society? Pushkin could have formed a small friendly circle of educated noblemen and raznochintsi round himself, of course, and taken refuge in it. Upbringing and habit prevented him from doing so. He was drawn to high society in the same way, for example, as his friend Chaadayev, who, according to the author of My Past and Thoughts^^61^^ who knew him well, was a living protest against the whirlwind of faces revolving senselessly around him, was fretful and became strange and alienated from society, yet could not abandon it. Like Chaadayev Pushkin, while seeking distraction in the upper stratum of society, kept his finest thoughts for himself. Belinsky considered that Chatsky should never have joined the circle of the Famusovs, the Tugoukhovsky princes, the Khryumina countesses, etc. It is interesting that Pushkin’s comments on Wit Works Woe express a different view. Pushkin is not surprised that Chatsky moves in high society. But he thinks it was unforgivable to utter the sort of speeches that Chatsky made in this society. "The first sign of an intelligent person is to know at first glance whom you are dealing with and not to cast pearls before a Repetilov, etc.” This will be right if we add after 204 the epithet "intelligent” "and not lacking in experience of theworld". But this is not the point.... The important thing is that in certain historical periods an unwillingness to cast pearls before the cold and backward mob is bound to lead intelligent and talented people to the theory of art for art’s sake.

The idea in the poem "The Poet" was also misunderstood by Belinsky. In it Pushkin does not give poets permission to be base until Apollo summons them to the holy sacrifice. He does not talk about what a poet should be, but shows what a poet is and what inspiration means for him. In the Egyptian Nights the Italian composer is a most unattractive person: he is uneducated, empty, not averse to servility, and greedy. But this same composer is regenerated under the influence of inspiration. One wonders whether this really happens or whether Pushkin is doing an injustice to the psychology of talent by attributing to it a feature which is incompatible with it. We believe that there is no injustice here; the feature pointed out by Pushkin can be found at any time; but there are periods in which almost all talented people in a certain social class resemble Pushkin’s Italian composer. These are periods of social indifferentism and a decline of civic morality. They correspond to the stage of social development when the given ruling class is preparing to leave the historical stage, but has not yet done so because the class which is to put an end to its rule has not yet fully matured. In such periods people in the ruling class follow the principle "Apres nous le deluge" and each thinks only of himself,’abandoning the public good to the mercy of blind chance. It is obvious that in such periods poets too do not escape the common fate: their souls fall into a "cold slumber”, their moral level sinks very low. They do not then ask themselves whether the cause is right or whether the order that they are serving with their talent is a good one. They seek only rich patrons, concern themselves only with the profitable sale of their works. But the magical effect of talent influences them too, and they become nobler and more moral in moments of inspiration. In such moments the gifted poet thinks only of his work, experiences the disinterested delight of creation and becomes purer because he forgets the base passions that move him at other times! And it was this ennobling influence of poetic creation that Pushkin wished to point out. He did not go into philosophico-historical considerations but was obviously very interested in the psychology of the artist.  [204•*  It was comforting for him to think that however much fate might oppress him, whatever humiliations it held in store for him, it could not take away from him the sublime delights of creation.