JOHN BAYLEY
205
wrote very fast when the mood was on him, for twelve or fifteen hours a
day, and revised afterwards at his leisure back in the capital. The Boldino
autumn of 1830 saw the creation both of the "Little Tragedies" -
The
Stone Guest, Mozart and Salieri,
and two others - and the
Tales oj Belkin,
Pushkin's first considered and completed venture into prose, which was
published anonymously in the following year. He also wrote the magical
poem
Ocen
("Autumn"), included in the
Penguin Book oj Russian Verse
edited by Dimitri Obolensky, which in its relaxed and lyrically humorous
stanzas gives a good idea of Pushkin's temperament and working
methods.
Like Shakespeare Pushkin was not really a literary inventor or inno–
vator: he was prepared to take up and supply whatever seemed in de–
mand, remarking once that he sold his wares for the best price he could
get, as the cobbler did his boots. In this spirit he decided very deliberately
to write
prose:
poetry having come to him when he was young as natu–
rally as the song to the bird. Every sentence of the
Tales oj Belkin
is de–
prived of any poetic cadence, and made terse, transparent and effective.
Pushkin very likely had in mind the remarks of his contemporary, the
novelist Betuzhev. "A child is attracted to a rattle before it is attracted
to a compass ... We have ceased to listen to poetry since everyone be–
came able to write it. So there is a general outcry. 'Give us prose. Wa–
ter, plain Water.' "
Pushkin might have smiled good-naturedly at these slighting
comments on his natural medium; but it is a fact that, unlike earlier
Romantic writers such as Coleridge, he thought the two media should
be very firmly demarcated . "No writer of both prose and verse,"
observed one of his early critics, "in Russia or even in the west, has made
such a severe and firm boundary between the two kinds of utterance."
Russia's remarkable literary renaissance was developing so rapidly that it
seems to have foreshortened in a few years the change from poetry
seeming the "natural" medium to a time when prose and the novel were
more dominant. With us the Elizabethans and Jacobeans who, as it were,
"spoke" poetry are succeeded by Augustans who spoke prose, and then
by Victorians who talked in fiction -
a
change that took place over
more than three centuries. In Russia something like the same process
occurred within a single generation. Pushkin and Lermontov, a poet
who went on to write the remarkable novel,
A Hero oj Our Time,
are its
two
great exemplars, both starting with poetry and ending with the
oovel.
But there were also many and in fact more popular writers at the
time who plunged naively into the world of popular historical romance
- the world familiarized throughout Europe by the novels of Sir Walter
