JOHN BAYLEY
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neither you nor she will forget what has happened." The parable in the
Gospels necessarily passes over an important point to which Pushkin's
spare narrative acutely draws our attention. Of course the prodigal son
and his father could never have been on the same terms again: there
would always have been unease and resentment. And a very droll and
Pushkinian incident follows in this story. The young man forces some
banknotes on the stationmaster, which he indignantly flings on the
pavement. "After having gone a few steps he stopped, reflected and re–
turned . .. but the notes were no longer there " A young dandy has al–
ready picked them up and made off in a cab. As he tells his tale to the
"Titular Counsellor" the old man wipes away tears , "partly induced by
the punch, of which he had drunk five glasses in the course of his narra–
tive, but for all that they had moved me deeply." Ironic reversal of the
parable continues to the end, for it is the father and not the prodigal
child who goes to the bad. He dies of drink, grieving over the fall of his
prodigal daughter, who is bringing up a family in happiness and security.
None of Pushkin's parodies deride or belittle their source, but give it
a further dimension of human interest. In "The Snowstorm" the con–
cealed target is the contemporary vogue for tales about romantic elope–
ments and demon bridegrooms; and the narrator - "Miss
K.
1.
T." - not
only shares the romantic feelings of her hero and heroine, rejoicing in the
coincidence that brings Burmin to the feet of the girl on whom he has
played his heartless jest, but she also appears unaware of the literary
material - like the nightmare end of the heroine in Burger's famous
poem
Lenore
-
on which her story draws. The spontaneity and innocence
of the narrator thus gives the paradigm of the tale a new lease of freshness
and surprise. The narrator gives a personal life to the story material, and
Pushkin in the background plays this off against the convention of the
anecdote itself. The shop assistant who is anecdotalist in "The Under–
taker" naturally enters into the story's keen pride in trade, cheating and
securing customers, to the point of sharing a kind of touchy dignity on
the customers' behalf after they have been buried.
The sense of human nature in the stories is as penetrating, but also as
casual and as unemphatic, as it is in Shakespeare's plays. The old station–
master, for instance, cannot understand that the events in individual lives
do not necessarily follow the traditional patterns of the moral law and
the scriptures. In "The Shot," Silvio is a man fixated by his own image, a
melodramatist cut off from the prosaic world, and the operation of prose
reveals him as a figure isolated by his eccentricity of will from the hum–
drum uncertainty and contingency of the prose world. I feel sure that
Lermontov borrowed the figure of Silvio, and metamorphosed him into
A Hero of Our Time.
But there is nothing in the least demonstrative or
exemplary about Pushkin's mode of narrative: his stories always avoid
