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JOHN BAYLEY
and next of kin, who turns out never to have met Belkin, and who refers
the would-be editor to a friend, a "candid and simple" fellow, who
rambles on about the Belkin's literary projects (Pushkin always had a
good many of those on hand) and how his manuscript. has been used by
the housekeeper "for a number of domestic purposes," the windows in
her room begin repaired with pages from an unfinished novel. Belkin had
picked up tales from various quarters, and a footnote refers to the entries
he made on his sources. "Miss K.
1.
T." supplied the romantic tales, and
an army lieutenant "The Shot." Nor do the devices for referring au–
thorship further and further back end there, for "The Shot" has three
internal narrators and "The Stationmaster" two.
In spite of their air of parody, and of conscious and almost demure
mischievousness, the
Tales of Belkin
are by no means lacking in human
warmth and human comedy. They are not just experimental set pieces.
The funniest of them, "The Station-master," is both the most parodic
and yet at the same time the most moving, even compassionate, of the
stories. The fashionable notion of "feeling" and "sentiment" had long
since arrived in Russian literary circles, through the novels of Rousseau,
and above all through Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
and
A Sentimental
Journey,
which had an extraordinary success in Russia, greater than in any other
European country. They had been vulgarized in the historian Kararnzin's
novel
Poor Liza,
a tear-jerker whose title explains itself, and which had
made readers in St. Petersburg and Moscow weep buckets back in 1872.
Poor Liza was seduced and abandoned by her lover and committed sui–
cide: Dunya, the stationmaster's beautiful daughter, appears bound for
the same fate, certainly in the eyes of her grief-stricken father; but then
the unexpected occurs and the conventional pattern is broken. The hus–
sar with whom she has run off does not desert her but makes her happy.
As his mistress she is delighted to have children and grand clothes and a
carriage; and she does not forget her sorrowing and unforgiving father
but comes to kneel and weep by his grave. The reversal of expectation is
not only comic by extremely touching, as well as being perfectly possible.
As early readers must have spotted, and critics were later to demon–
strate, it also reverses the parable of the prodigal son, texts and pictures
from which adorn the walls of the station master's little house. And,
when Dunya goes off with her hussar, her father persists in interpreting
the event in the light of the parable. He will search for his "lost lamb,"
forgive her and bring her home. When he traces the hussar to Petersburg
the trail of the unexpected begins. He begs for his daughter to be re–
stored to him, even though her honor is lost, but the ashamed and yet
exasperated young man assures him that Dunya is very well off "She
loves me; she has become unaccustomed to her former style of life. And
