JOHN BAYLEY
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Tragedies," were very much in vogue at the time; and Merimee had
made his own name with his
Theatre de Clara Gazul,
which at first he
successfully passed off as having been written by a Spanish actress. He also
hoaxed his public with
La
Guzla,
a collection of "illyria" poetry he had
composed himself; and he went on to publish in 1845 the story of
"Carmen" which inspired Bizet's opera.
Merimee was also the first Westerner to discern the genius of
Pushkin's poetry, although, when he attempted to interest his friend
Flaubert in a translation of it, the novelist merely commented: "II est
plat, votre poete." Pushkin's lyrics never have revealed, and never will,
their true virtues in translation. Their effect is all in the voices they give
to the Russian language. But so sophisticated an artist as Flaubert would
certainly have seen the point of the
Tales oj Belkin,
which Merimee
translated in a spirited but rather free fashion, using the devices of sensa–
tionalism and understatement for their own sake, as his own tales are apt
to do, and which indeed suits their crisp and ironic French idiom.
"Come il insiste peu!" observed Merimee admiringly of Pushkin's light
touch; but it is significant that his own stories became much better
known than Pushkin's internationally and have had a much greater influ–
ence on short-story style, contributing at a later date to the manner of a
Kipling. Pushkin's are too uninsistent even to make the kind of deadpan
impact we associate with the modern short story.
But they have other and in many ways more peculiar charms. Pushkin
seems to have felt that prose should be as unmemorable as possible, never
trapping itself in a phrase or an effect. As a poet he had only to open his
mouth and what came out became eternal and proverbial in his own
tongue. His instinct was that prose should be the opposite - a complete
contrast. The device of multiple narration has much to do with this,
dissolving as it does the single narrative tone of anecdote or
nouvelle.
When he had begun the "novel" about his own ancestor,
The Negro oj
Prier
the Great,
he may have broken off in response to the tone such a
genre was imposing on him: the local color of the current English
historical novel, and the conventional French tale of gallantry and in–
trigue. The elaborate security measures which hedge the
Tales oj Belkin
defend it from the dominance of such recognizable tones. We cannot, so
to
speak, tell from what direction the words are coming. The stories es–
cape into a limbo in which the elements of parody appear and vanish
without the apparent intention or consent of the narrator. The tales re–
new
entirely the concept of the anecdote, as Pushkin's "Little Tragedies"
renewed that of the dramatic fragment.
The "author" has undertaken only to arrange publication of the
stories of "the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin"; so he writes to Belkin's heir
