Pushkin and the Novel

Abstract

Pushkin’s shoulders must be the broadest in Russian literature. The weight of paternity he has to bear for everything that came after him is awesome and, at least in modern times, virtually unparalleled. If he is the father of Russian literature, then it follows that he must also be father to its most characteristic and important, one might even say its defining, genre: the novel. The fact that he so patently is — at least in his capacity as author of Evgenii Onegin (‘Eugene Onegin’, 1823–30) — is so obvious that to question, or even restate, it would seem at first sight otiose, if not absurd. Nevertheless, even as far as this work is concerned, such a claim requires a certain degree of explanation, if not qualification. For, while Onegin clearly displays all the mastery of the true novelist, it is equally true that as a novel in verse it is very much a hybrid work and fundamentally different in all but subject-matter from anything that it supposedly gives rise to later on in the century. Indeed, we might say that it is precisely this difference, this sui generis character it possesses, which constitutes its principal and peculiar attraction. Of course Onegin is a novel, but it is also as if Pushkin were playing in it, rather like some literary gardener, at grafting genres, for in many respects it resembles a long narrative poem, of the type he was writing contemporaneously throughout its lengthy composition.

‘You don’t mean to say there are Russian novels?’

(The Countess in The Queen of Spades)