JOHN BAYLEY
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no resemblance to those tales of Hoffinann and Balzac in which a super–
natural secret gives power to the possessor and in the end corrupts and
destroys him. It would be hard to imagine anyone less suited to such a
role as the old countess. She was not corrupted by the magic formula
because she had no need of money and never thought of it. Once her
debt of honor in Paris was paid (and as Pushkin reminds us she would
not have been concerned to discharge a debt to a tradesman) she was
never tempted to use her secret again, except once to help out a young
protege, and she never passed the secret on to her sons. The moral is
obvious: class has no need of magic. Adhering to a way of life with all
the tenacity of unconscious conviction, it is as difficult to corrupt as to
reform. The old countess is just as she would have heen if the extraordi–
nary secret had never been revealed to her.
For young Hermann, on the contrary, a road to the power that
money brings is all-important. The final touch at the macabre worldliness
of the countess's funeral is the old court dignitary's whispered comment
to the English bystander that the young officer who goes up like the
others, to bid farewell to the coffin, was the countess's natural son. The
Hemunns, and all they stand for, are indeed the natural sons of the old
regime, and in a disturbing sense. There is cheerful irony in the ending -
Hermann removed, Lizaveta married, Tomsky and the Princess Pauline
betrothed - but the deeper implications of the tale are not at all
reassuring. The future is haunted by the past it has destroyed and sought
to exploit. When she is dead the old countess enters into a sinister inti–
macy with Hermann, unthinkable when she was alive; and the wink from
the coffin is horribly at variance with her living self, and with the funeral
decorum around her.
Although he admired "the Scottish enchanter," Pushkin was well
aware of the shortcomings of his imitators. "These pale productions are
read all over Europe," he remarked in a review. "Is it because the por–
trayal of bygone times, even if feeble and inaccurate, has ... charm for
the imagination sunk in the humdrum monotony of the present?" He
probably felt that only recent history could be turned into genuine art;
and both
The Captain's Daughter
and the unfinished
Dubrovsky
are set in
the reign of Catharine, virtually "Sixty years since," like the subtitle of
Scott's own progenitor,
Waverley.
Pushkin's prose style, with its sure
sense of timing and its equable but resonant simplicity, is admirably suited
to
the tale of adventure in the recoverable past - perhaps better suited
than to the society novels which he projected but never followed
through. Pushkin's genius is of the kind that having made its point can–
not bear to
fill
in the details, to repeat or to indulge itself in local color
for its own sake. He admired Byron for being a writer who "liked to
spring like a tiger from the jungle," and abandon his prey to others after
