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Vyacheslav Ivanov

“A lonely cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island
and Pushkin’s tales about
St. Petersburg



 I would like to talk about the very beginning of a trend of Russian writing connected to St.Petersburg and initiated by Pushkin.

 A whole series of works by greatest Russian authors has constituted what Vladimir Toporov has aptly called the ”St.Petersburg text” (петербургский текст). This is a large group of works written by different prose authors and poets but sharing some features that makes it a single tradition that has been kept for many generations. All these features relate to the city on the Neva river, to its architecture and sculptures particularly to the statue of Peter the Great and the new mythology (the so-called Petersburg myth) created around the image of the founder of the new capital of Russia . To give only few examples from modern literature: Toporov who had earlier studied this problem on the example of Dostoevsky has recently published a whole book on St.Petersburg text and myth as seen in verses of the greatest poet of the beginning of the XXth century Alexander Blok. The most important prose author of the same symbolist period Andrey Bely has written a novel Petersburg that according to Nabokov deserves to be compared to the works by Joyce, Proust and Kafka (by the way, to each of their great novels an important European city corresponds: in “Ulysses” we see Dublin, in “Recherches du Temps perdu”- Paris and its suburbs and in an imaginary city of the “Prozess” particularly in its temple- Dom one can recognize Prague and its Gothic buildings).

 But let us return to St.Petersburg and to the beginning of the text created about it. Pushkin’s initial contribution to this tradition includes several poetic works first of all the long poem “The Bronze Horseman” that has helped to create the myth about this sculpture of Peter. Also such prose works as a short novel “The Queen of Spades” belong to this cycle. In it we may see Pushkin not only as a founder of the whole Petersburg text tradition but also as the first Russian author who has written in the style of fantastic realism to use the term later introduced by Dostoevsky (in his essay on Edgar Poe). Continuing Gogol’ Dostoevsky would himself write about St.Petersburg in this style: its main feature is a combination of a fantastic plot with realistic details. To Pushkin’s writings connected to these serious works also a grotesque narrative “A small Cottage in Kolomna “ belongs. It is a half-joking funny story in which we may see some details similar to the other works of the cycle (as Khodasevich was the first to recognize). It was characteristic about Pushkin that he could write on a subject in a highly elevated style, but at the same time could also compose a sort of a parody of it. Let us read a stanza from the Bronze Horseman where the poet directly addresses the city in an elevated style:

    I love you, Peter’s own creation;
    I love your stern, your stately air,
    Neva ’s majestical pulsation,
    The granite that her quaysides wear.

    Люблю тебя, Петра творенье,
    Люблю твой строгий, стройный вид,
    Невы державное теченье,
    Береговой ее гранит.

The same images and details of the city landscape are repeated in another poem where the poetic mood is absolutely different:

    You are wretched, you are splendid,
    Stately air, cold, granite, spleen,
    Servitude has never ended,
    And the sky is pale and green.

     Город пышный, город бедный,
    Дух неволи, стройный вид,
    Свод небес зелено-бледный,
    Скука, холод и гранит.

 The same expression “stately air” (стройный вид) is used in both passages. In the first of them it constitutes a part of the pathetic description of the magnificent city that Pushkin admires. Pushkin saw in St.Petersburg and its architectural harmony realization of what he understood as a thing of beauty. But in the second poem the expression “stately air” is combined in the same line with the “Spirit of Servitude” (non-freedom, не-воля) hostile to Pushkin: starting from his youth his favorite word and notion was Freedom (воля, свобода).

 Also in both passages we find the image of granite. In the first one it refers to those pictures of the river Neva and its quaysides that belong to traditional poetic view of St.Petersburg. It can be seen already in Pushkin’s Onegin where in connection to granite he referred to a poem of Muravyev, his predecessor in praising St.Petersburg who had written about the night spent by a poet near this granite. But in Pushkin’s second fragment cited above granite is combined to spleen and cold to create a picture of a dull Northern city made of stone where the sky is green and not blue as in those Southern countries that Pushkin liked so much.

 But the same short poem with a negative view of the city explains why still life there was possible and even pleasant to the poet in spite of all:

     Still I feel a sort of pity
    Since I see the foot so dear
    Gently walking in the city,
    Golden curls are waving here.

     Все же мне вас жаль немножко,
    Потому что здесь порой
    Ходит маленькая ножка,
    Вьется локон золотой.

 Women whom the poet admired were to him the essence of the beauty of St.Petersburg. The fates of young women in the city are at the core of what Pushkin has written on St.Petersburg.

 The whole cycle of mature Pushkin’s works connected to St.Petersburg and opening this large vista in the Russian Literature starts with his oral short story “A lonely Cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island ”. He told it several times to his friends and acquaintances. For the first part he did it being in exile in 1825. Then he repeated his improvisation after returning to the city in late 1827 or in the first months of 1828. A young writer Titov who was present at this event was impressed by Pushkin’s narrative. He could not sleep the whole night. Then he wrote down the story as he remembered it and brought his notes to Pushkin. The poet corrected the text and Titov published it using a pseudonym. We may suppose now that Pushkin would not like to publish it as his own story mainly because of the secret hint contained in the introduction. As Akhmatova found it describes the place in a suburb of the city where Pushkin was looking for graves in which the five leaders of the decembrists’ revolt had been buried. They had been hanged and their fate was a cause of permanent suffering for the poet. In his drawings we often meet pictures of gallows with five corpses on them. Once he added a line “ I also might have been on gallows” (“И я бы мог висеть”). He was imagining himself among those who had been on the Senate Square on the day of the mutiny (that was a part of his first talk to the new king). To the poet Petersburg was not only the place of the royal military parades described in The Bronze Horseman, but also a city where the decembrists’ revolt had been crushed and where The Spirit of Servitude (Дух Неволи) had ruled since then.

 A landscape of the suburb where a road goes to the Smolensk German graveyard and farther to the hidden graves of the five decembrists is common to several Pushkin’s works of this group including also a poem describing poet’s visits to this graveyard. We have reasons to suppose that the story about a lonely cottage was composed as a sort of a secret funerary composition. That can partly explain the gloomy atmosphere of the narrative. Some of its fantastic symbols personify death and the forces of the Evil. Devils in dresses and hats that hide their corns are playing cards in a house of a countess as they do in Pushkin’s poems about the card games of devils in the hell. A coachman whom the hero met after he had lost his way somewhere in the suburbs of the city showed to him his face or mask: it was a scull of a dead man. There was no usual regular number on the carriage of this miraculous coachman: his sign was the apocalyptic symbol 666.

 The idea that a large city is like a hell was not new; in the first years of the XVI I century Gongora wrote a sonnet Madrid in 1610 beginning with a line: Esto es Madrid , mejor dijera infierno “This is not Madrid , it is simply hell”. A similar notion had been developed later on by many predecessors of Strinberg’s Inferno where such a diabolic image of Paris anticipated later urbanistic works by symbolist authors like Rilke and Blok (who was influenced by Strindberg). But Pushkin not only succeeded in constructing a poetic image of a sort of a branch of the hell in a modern city with devils playing cards in a beau monde. In the style of fantastic realism (in which he might be seen as a forerunner not only of Dostoevsky and Bely, but of Bulgakov with his Voland in “Master and Margaret”) he combined these fantastic pictures to stories about simple girls living in small cabins with their mothers. Fantasy transforming his dark experience lead to the Devil while as a realistic author he would like to depict the women who lived in the city. Thus it turns out that the plot is based on relations between women and creatures connected to the Devil if not the Devil himself. In A Lonely Cottage the devil seduces a young woman whom the hero has loved and in The Queen of Spade a demon-like hero Germann misuses naïve feelings of Liza in an attempt to find the old lady’s card number secret.

 As it often happened to Pushkin while composing a narrative he had chosen a Western European story as a pattern the scheme and images of which he would like to recreate or follow. If one permits me a metaphor taken from the history of the city I might point out to a similar way in which Peter the Great was thinking of his favorite Western European city Amsterdam when he was building a part of St.Petersburg called New Netherlands (Новая Голландия). In the case of the Lonely Small Cabin in it as also in the plot of a projected small tragedy “The Devil in Love” Pushkin was following Le diable amoureux by Cazotte, a French author of the XVIIIth century whose images attracted later many admirers from Baudelaire to Apollinaire. Schulz’s remarkable works have shown that Pushkin has imitated not only some episodes in Cazotte’s story but also drawings that accompanied it in its original edition that Pushkin possessed. He liked Cazotte because of his mystical inclinations close to German romanticists: at that time Pushkin was also reading Hoffmann. At that period Pushkin has already gone far away from the optimistic rational thinking of the Enlightment. In The Queen of Spades the number game is a symbol of the role of a chance; to Pushkin “Chance is the God-Inventor” (Случай- Бог- изобретатель). It is not accidental that there were several treatises on probabilities theory in his library. In modern terms we might have said that he was moving from a deterministic picture of the world to a probabilistic vision.

 In The Queen of Spades the name of Svedenborg appears (approximately at the same time Balzac writes his Seraphita based on Svedenborg’s idea; the image and the name are revived later in Osip Mandelstam ‘s poems dedicated to one of the most beautiful ladies of prerevolutionary Petersburg). Mystical images verge on hallucinations as the card numbers that appear to Germann in his ravings and as the statue of the Peter the Great persecuting poor Evgenij in “The Bronze Rider”. In “The Queen of Spades” St.Petersburg was shown as a background for a tragedy of Germann whose greed lead him to madness. In The Bronze Horseman Evgenij becomes crazy after the catastrophe of the flood. The theme of abnormality haunts Pushkin at this time; he is afraid of madness. But it seems to be inherent in the city itself, in its atmosphere. Nothing can be more distant from the rational classicism that made him admire the Petersburg palaces.

 His Petersburg stories are full of contrasts. One of the main reasons for conflicts is social inequality. The woman whom the hero is fond of in the beginning of A lonely Cottage comes from a poor family; the hero temporarily forgets her as the devil introduces him to a countess whose guests would offend him as an outcaste. In The Bronze Horseman the main opposition is that between a hero who is a penniless clerk with “employment in some bureau” and the king who in Evgenij’s ravings follows him in the streets of the city. The center of the Petersburg myth has been created by Pushkin when in his poem the statue of Peter the Grave has been revived. This main part of Pushkin’s personal mythology (as discovered by Roman Jakobson) has remained important for several generations and became integrated into the Petersburg text. The same statue of the Bronze Horseman enters a pub where a hero of Bely’s Petersburg is sitting and then climbs up the stairs in his house.

 In Pushkin’s poem behind an opposition between the king and a young man there is another one: Peter and Petersburg is opposed to Russia as a whole. Again here the direct continuation will be found in Bely’s Petersburg where geometrically structured regular capital is contrasted to the chaotic rest of the country.

 To show the instability of the artificial structure of the city Pushkin has chosen the story of a flood. As also his study of Pugachev’s revolt, the choice of this subject and the way in which he writes about it shows that he would like to demonstrate how the forces of nature and human history can destroy a seeming balance achieved by the culture. At the end of a flood Evgenij sees the cottage where Parasha and her mother lived : in a poem it is a sign of the dreamlike fragility of reality. At the end of A Lonely Cottage the house of the female hero where she lived with her mother perishes in the fire. A fireman seems to have recognized a smiling face of the devil similar to what we may observe on Pushkin’s pictures of the inhabitants of the hell.

 Pushkin was a poet of harmony and at the same time he admired the abyss near the borders of which we experience ecstasy. Both these attitudes are seen in his Petersburg tales. He understood the role of Chance that is not only makes creation possible but also destroys what has been created. Thus he has shown us more than pictures of Petersburg of his own time and of a century before that. In his Petersburg text we may guess a vision of the catastrophes that had to come to the city.


The text represents a talk given at the University of Yale at a conference dedicated to the celebration of the 300 years of foundation of St. Petersburg . I would like to express gratitude to Michael Heim who has helped to shape the English translation of a short poem by Pushkin.


1. Ахматова, А.А. Сочинения в двух томах, т.2. Проза и переводы. М.: Панорама, 1990, с. 129-136, 181, 184-185

2.Иванов Вяч.Вс. Еще раз об “Уединенном домике на Васильевском” Пушкина.- “Звезда”, 2001, № 6, с. 129-143.

3. Иванов Вяч.Вс. О принципах и методах реконструкции недошедшего до нас произведения («Влюбленный бес» Пушкина).- first published in: «Тыняновские чтения» М., 2002, an expanded version has been printed in: Иванов Вяч.Вс. «Избранные труды по семиотике и истории культуры». Т. I I I. М. : Языки русской культуры, 2004, c.11-68. ).

4.Ходасевич. В.Ф. Петербургские повести Пушкина.- Ходасевич. В.Ф. Колеблемый треножник. Избранное. М.: Советский писатель, 1991, с. 172-185.

6. Шульц, Р. Пушкин и Книдский миф.München, 1985.

7. Шульц, Р. Пушкин и Казот. Washington , D.C. , 1987.

8. Jakobson, Roman The Statue in Pushkin’s Poetic Mythology.-In: R.Jakobson. Selected Writings, vol.V (On Verse,its Masters and Explorers). The Hague - Paris - New York : Mouton Publishers, 1979, pp. 237-280.

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