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p From the abstract viewpoint there is only an abstract difference between truth and error, between good and evil, between what is and what should be. In the struggle against a regime which has outlived its day such an abstract and consequently one-sided view of things is occasionally even very useful. But it prevents comprehensive study of the subject. Thanks to it literary criticism turns into publicistics. The critic concerns himself not with what is said in a work, but with what could have been said in it if the author had adopted the critic’s social views.

p The publicistic element is very evident in many of Belinsky’s remarks on Pushkin. But Pushkin is primarily the sort of poet who cannot be understood without abandoning the abstract viewpoint of the enlighteners. An enlightener finds it difficult to understand Pushkin.^^1^^ This is why Belinsky, in spite of all his remarkable artistic feeling, is often unfair to him.

p Aleko, the hero of the poem The Gypsies, kills the gypsy girl Zemfira, whom he loves, in a fit of jealousy. Belinsky attacks him bitterly for this, and also has a dig at the insincere liberals of whom D. Davydov says:

p Take a look—our Lafayette,
Brutus or Fabritius
Puts his peasants ’neath the press
Like beetroot, cool and vicious.

The ardent propagation of true morality, which takes the form of deeds and not only words, and ardent protest against jealousy, as a feeling which is unworthy of a morally developed person, fill most of the pages of Belinsky’s analysis of The Gypsies. It is all quite sensible in itself; it is all very well expressed, as is always the case with Belinsky, and it is all extremely important for establishing and studying the links that connect him with the following generation of enlighteners. But it does not explain the true meaning of the poem. According to Belinsky, Pushkin wanted to portray in The Gypsies a person who valued human dignity very highly and therefore broke away from a society that degraded this dignity at every turn, but in fact wrote a harsh satire both on Aleko himself and on all those like him. But Pushkin’s poem is by no means simply a satire on egoism and inconsistency. It goes far more deeply into things, explaining the psychology of a whole historical period. Aleko attacks the social conventions of his day but, finding himself in the almost primitive environment of the gypsies, he continues to be guided in his relations with the woman he loves by views which prevail in the society which he has left. He seeks to restore that which he wanted to

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210 destroy. His psychology is the psychology of the French Romantics. The French Romantics were also unable lo break away from the very social relations against which they revolted. "I am attacking husbands, not marriage,” wrote George Sand. This is extremely characteristic. The Romantics would attack capitalists at times, but they never had anything against capitalism, they sympathised with the poor, but were ready to take up arms in defence of a social order that was based on the exploitation of the poor. Our romanticism, in many respects an imitation of the French, was guilty of the same sin, but to an even greater extent. The Narodism of our day, which complains loudly and mournfully about capitalism, but in fact cultivates petty capitalism, shows clearly that we have still not parted company with romanticism. Pushkin was well aware of the Romantics’ fundamental contradiction, although he was not, of course, able to comprehend it historically. Moreover, at the lime when he wrote the poem, lie himself had not yet parted company witli romanticism entirely. The Gypsies is a Romantic poem which reveals the Achilles’ heel of romanticism.

p There is nothing inconsistent in Aleko’s character: Aleko is what lie should be according to his origin. It is rather the characters of the secondary personages in the poem thai are inconsistent. Thus, for example, the character of Zemfira is not consistent in her relationship with her husband. She admits that he has certain rights over her. But where have these rights come from? For it is obvious that Zemlira’s environment does not recognise them. An old gypsy says:

p Freer titan a bird is love: endeavour
To cage it, and from you ’twill fly.

p Pushkin himself was unclear as to the relations that should have been established between Aleko and Zemfira. Hence the inconsistency in their portrayal. But Beliusky did not notice this inconsistency, because his attention was concentrated on how truly developed people should regard the emotion of jealousy.

p Many passages in Belinsky’s analysis of Onegin are also explained by the same abstract viewpoint. We shall not speak of the passages in which he discusses human nature in general or what man is born for, for good or for evil. There lie is an enlightener of the first water. We shall point to his attitude to Tatyana. He sympathises with her greatly, but cannot forgive her for her iinai talk with Onegin. He does not understand eternal fidelity without love. "Eternal fidelity to whom and in what?" lie asks, "fidelity to relations that are a profanation of a woman’s feeling and purity, because certain relations, unsanctified by love, arc highly 211 immoral__ But in our country all this is somehow mixed up together: poetry and (life), love and marriage of convenience, the life of the heart and the strict performance of external obligations which are violated hourly inside the person.” Talyana’s character seems to him to be a mixture of rural dreaminess and urban prudence, and he finds more to his liking the character of Maria in Poltava, which is, in his opinion, the finest ever drawn by Pushkin’s pen.

p As we know, Pisarev’s attitude to Talyana was completely negative and he did not understand how Belinsky could have felt any sympathy for the undeveloped "dreamy girl".

p This difference in the attitude of the two erilighteners to one and the same female type is extremely interesting. The fact is that Belinsky’s view of women was very different from that of the enlighteners of the sixties. Tatyana won his heart by the strength of her love, and he continued to think that a woman’s main purpose was love. People no longer thought so in the sixties, and therefore the extenuating circumstance, which to a large extent reconciled Belinsky to Tatyana, ceased to exist for the enlighteners of that period.

In connection with "My Hero’s Genealogy" Belinsky rebukes Pushkin sharply for his aristocratic predilections. He says: "The poet accuses high-born people of our day of despising their forefathers, their fame, rights and honour, an accusation which is as limited as it is unfounded. If a person does not boast of being directly descended from some great man, does this necessarily mean that he despises his great ancestor, his fame and his great deeds? Such a conclusion would appear to be totally arbitrary. To despise one’s ancestors, even if they have done nothing good, is absurd and foolish: one need not respect them if there is nothing to respect them for, but at the same time one should not despise them if there is nothing to despise them for. Where there is no place for respect, there is not always place for contempt; one respects what is good and despises what is bad; but the absence of something good does not always presuppose the presence of something bad_r and vice versa. It is even more absurd to take pride in another’s greatness or be ashamed of another’s baseness. The former idea is well explained in Krylov’s excellent fable The Geese; the latter is clear in itself.” In another passage in the article he remarks: "As the descendant of an old family Pushkin would have been known only to his circle of friends, and not to Russia, which would have found nothing of interest in this fact; but as a poet Pushkin became known to the whole of Russia, which takes pride in him now as a son who does honour to his mother.... Who needs to know that a poor nobleman who exists by his literary works is rich in a long line of ancestors of little fame in history? It would be far more interesting to know what new work this brilliant poet will write."

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212 This is true, but nevertheless the question of Pushkin’s aristocratic predilections is far more complex than Belinsky thought. In these predilections there lay more than just imitation of Byron and the West European aristocratic writers in general. They contained a great deal that was original, Russian, a great deal that could no longer be found in France or England in the nineteenth century. In order to explain ourselves, we shall ask the reader to imagine that Molchalin, who grovels before the Famusovs and all other people of rank, has himself reached a "fairly high rank”, as Chatsky predicted. One can be sure that in this case he would proudly stick his head in the air and not show a trace of his former humility. And his children would have become unbearably arrogant at an early age and most likely regarded themselves as great aristocrats. We have no sympathy for aristocratic pretensions, but the false aristocratism of high-ranking parvenus is far more insupportable than the aristocratism of a nobleman of high birth, if he decides to flay the conceited parvenu with a malicious epip-ram, if he says to him, as Pushkin does:

p My grandsire never hawked bliny,
The tsar’s boots never polished he,
Nor chanted psalms with readers, nor
To prince climbed though a moujik born
Nor was he a deserter from
The powdered German cohorts even....
A blue blood?—No, not I! ... Thank Heaven,
It’s of the tiers état I come!

p In expectation of the blessed time that will make him a really big gentleman, Molchalin might show his new-born arrogance in a special type of democratism which expresses itself in impotent sorties against people of high breeding, provided only that these people are far from authority. Such democratism is similar to the false democratism of the bourgeois grown rich, who attacks the aristocracy enviously, dreaming at the same time of marrying his bourgeois daughter off to a prince or at least a baron. Pushkin frequently came up against the pathetic and vile democratism of the Molchalin kind, and he ridiculed its donkey’s hoof. What of it? In his own way he was right. By comparison with the democratism of China even the Indian castes are a great step forward: by comparison with the latest type of Molchalin democratism, i.e., the democratism of the Vorontsovs, the Hofstetters and company, even the most undiluted Manchesterism^^69^^ is a progressive phenomenon.

Everything is relative. Enlighteners always forget this, but in different periods of social development they forget it in different ways. Pisarev, like Belinsky, regarded Onegin’s character with 213 the eyes of an enlightencr, yet he condemned him unreservedly and extremely bitterly, whereas Belinsky was very indulgent towards him. Onegin won over Belinsky by the soberness of his views and the lack of bombast in his speeches. Quoting the passage in which Pushkin describes his acquaintanceship with Onegin Belinsky remarks: "From these lines we at least see clearly that Onegin was not cold, dull or callous, that poetry dwelt in his soul and that in general he was not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill sort of person. His natural propensity for dreaming, his sensitivity and delight in the contemplation of the beauties of nature and the recollection of love affairs of former years—all this speaks more of feeling and poetry, than of coldness and dullness. The point is merely that Onegin did not allow himself to be carried away by dreams, he felt more than he said, and did not confide in everyone. An embittered mind is also the sign of a noble nature, because a person with an embittered mind is dissatisfied not only with people but also with himself.” Pisarev did not like bombastic speeches either, but he could riot be satisfied with Onegin’s soberness and intellect; he did not even consider him an intelligent person, because Onegin’s whole life was a contradiction of what the enlighteners of the sixties demanded of an intelligent person. Belinsky says that Pushkin was right to choose a hero from the upper class of society. In Pisarev’s eyes Onegin was guilty simply by virtue of the fact that he belonged to the upper class and shared its customs and prejudices. Belinsky was right here, of course, and Pisarev wrong. But between Belinsky’s articles on Pushkin and Pisarev’s articles on him lay the year 1801,^^70^^ which set the interests of the nobility against the interests of the other estates, i.e., almost the whole of Russia. In Pisarev’s articles we shall understand nothing if we do not take this fact into consideration, and vice versa: everything down to the last word in them becomes clear, if we regard them from the historical viewpoint. However, we shall speak of Pisarev later; we have mentioned him now only to highlight certain of Belinsky’s views.