202
JOHN BAYLEY
and in his history of Pugachev's rebellion.
His ominous relation with the Tsar was in the end to be the death
of Pushkin. Having visited the Caucasus again, this time with his brother
Lev who was there in the army, he renewed his courtship of Natalia
Goncharova, a beautiful girl of seventeen who had turned him down six
months before. Her family was as impoverished as Pushkin's, but Natalia
and her mother now saw possibilities in his connection with the imperial
court. She returned Pushkin's love after a fashion, and when they were
married became very dependent on him. She wanted to appear and in–
deed tried to be a good wife; but she wanted everything else as well that
high society could give her. The Tsar soon noticed her remarkable
beauty, and insisted on Pushkin becoming a court page, an appointment
absurdly incongruous with his age and position, in order that his wife
would be invited to every ball at the palace.
The situation might seem set for disaster, and yet Pushkin was not, as
was his great successor and .near contemporary Lermontov, a tragic char–
acter with a Byronic
besoin de fatalite.
Though he was volatile and quick
to take offence, his cheerful and good-natured disposition made him, like
Mozart, a family man who might have lived to a good age if things had
gone differently, and happily seen his children growing up about him.
Although her worldliness and flirtatiousness would have continued to vex
him for a time, Natalia's fondness for him and dependence on him might
have increased as she grew older. What sort of a writer would he have
become in that case? That is hard to say, as it is in the parallel cases of
Keats, Byron or Shelley. At the time of his death he had almost given
up
writing poetry, but his extraordinary versatility was expanding in other
directions: he was trying out a variety of prose fictions, "inventing" the
kinds of novels which his successors would enlarge and develop. Whether
or not he would have brought some or all of them to fruition, given
time and leisure, these beginnings remain in themselves a remarkable and
varied achievement. Some of the unfinished chapters remind us of
Stendhal or Balzac, some of Fontane or of Kleist (whom Pushkin never
read, and who had shot himself in Berlin when Pushkin was a boy at
school); some even of Thackeray, Trollope or George Eliot. Of such
diversity were the rapid traces of Pushkin's maturing genius.
His prose work contains masterpieces, like the tales and the historical
nouvelles,
and many more things that might have become masterpieces.
But the cares of his family - his wife was extravagant - of business and
debt, were beginning to weigh heavily upon him. One thing that
cheered him at this time was the permission to found and edit a new
journal.
The Contemporary (Sovremennik)
was to be on the model of the
famous English reviews like the
Edinburgh,
and Pushkin had hopes of its
