210
JOHN BAYLEY
being
cantes.
Lermontov learned from him the odd mixture of familiarity
and evasiveness in the
Tales;
and Gogol, who deeply admired them, may
be said to have developed and elaborated evasiveness as a sometimes
al–
most flamboyant trademark of his own. Dostoevsky was to be influenced
by Pushkin in the same direction.
Pushkin only created the figure of Belkin after the tales themselves
were written, as a part of their mechanism of anonymity. He then seemed
too promising a concept to waste, and Pushkin at once went on to
write the "History of the Village of Goryukhino," in which Belkin
himself appears as the first-person narrator. This brilliantly funny and en–
gaging piece relaxes all the method of the
Tales.
We learn how Ivan
Petrovich, after a brief and uneventful military career, enters into his pa–
ternal inheritance, and out of sheer boredom determines to become a
writer:
All kinds of poetry - for I still did not think if humble prose - were
considered and appraised, and
I
at last opted for an epic poem, drawn
from the history of the fatherland .
The epic hangs fire, and other kinds of writing are tried - ballads,
tragedies, stories and finally history. Ivan Petrovich's attempts are in one
sense a burlesque of Pushkin's own literary progress - a comment on the
transition from poetry to prose, and from epic and romance to plain
historical record. His unfinished "history" of the manor seems to take an
unintentionally Shandean view of the nature and possibility of history it–
self; and "like a certain historian whose name escapes me" Ivan Petrovich
lays down his pen and goes into the garden to reflect on what he has
accomplished.
Attempting to transform the routine of life at the manor into his–
tory, as Gibbon had transformed the Roman empire, Ivan Petrovich be–
haves towards the reality of his world rather as Silvio and the
stationmaster behave in the tales he has collected: authorship and history
are to him an escape from the facts, as Silvio has his chivalric isolation in
revenge, and the stationmaster his fantasy of the prodigal son. His ap–
pended "source" reveal the true, untidy, comic and miserable nature of
things on a Russian estate, in which the peasants themselves take refuge
from reality by looking back on a mythological "happy time." Pushkin's
perception of history is not that of a scholar, but that of a Shakespeare
whose understanding lies in his imagination and his creative powers.
The same quickness of perception flickers through the way he writes
about high society. Before the
Tales of Belkin
were planned and com–
pleted he had been experimenting with a society novel, of which the
