214
JOHN BAYLEY
a successful kill. That seems to be why he so often lost interest in a theme
after he had revealed its inner potentiality.
But as his history of Pugachev's rebellion shows, he had staying
power when he was deeply interested in the implications of so far–
reaching and recent an event in Russian history. No wonder Tsar
Nicholas, an expert in the techniques and precautions of despotism, took
a special interest in Pushkin's task, and encouraged its progress, although
both the history and its companion in fictional form,
The Captain'S
Daughter
had to pass an inquisitive and persnickety censorship. And yet
what must have specially engaged Pushkin as he developed the novel was
the relation he found coming into being between Grinev - the innocent,
well-intentioned young man who does not think to question the status
of the gentry class to which he belongs and its right to rule - and the
crafty and cruel but also generous and amiable Cossack who has set up
his own kind of rule among the peasantry. Pugachev is capable both of
generosity and kindness: there is real fellow-feeling in young Grinev when
he thinks of him with affection - and by his Christian name "Emelya" -
disturbed in "spite of myself' at the thought of the fate that awaits him.
Every character in
The Captain's Daughter
has the kind of simple
reality which Pushkin's swift and economical prose seems to bring effort–
lessly into being. Grinev's first arrival at the fortress, and the night of the
blizzard, when he meets Pugachev, are especially memorable. Such
moments occur too in
Dubrovsky
-
the episode of setting fire to the
family house with the officials in it, and the rescue of the cat by the
blacksmith, are in Pushkin's best vein - but Durbrovsky himself is not
much more than the conventional romantic mystery man of the period;
and the feel of the tale never takes on a life of its own. The truth is that
Pushkin - again not so unlike Shakespeare - seems to have had small in–
stinctive gift for shaping and inventing a plot. Scott gives him a helping
hand in
The Captain's Daughter,
for even the relation of Grinev and Pu–
gachev echoes that between the young Waverley and Fergus McIvor. But
after taking an interest in authentic court reports about a tyrannical
landowner and his victim, a young member of the gentry who took in
consequence to a life of banditry and revenge, Pushkin seems to have lost
interest in his theme, and cast about for a way of finishing it that would
suit a romance melodrama. Five possible synopses in Pushkin's hand exist,
in most of which the story was to continue with Dubrosky escaping
abroad, after Maria Kirilovna's wedding and her refusal to run off with
him, and his return to Russia after she has become a widow. The au–
thorities become suspicious, and there is a reference to a meeting at an
inn and the figure of a police chief, who might have developed along
the lines of Dostoevsky's quiet policeman in
Crime and Punishment.
