The first proclamation of the new exalted conception of the artist was made by the Schellingian Prince Odoevsky in a new journal he founded in 1824 (with the Decembrist poet Kiichelbecker) to help create "a truly Russian poetry." Enjoying the collaboration of Pushkin and many of the leading poets of the age, the journal was appropriately called Mnemosyne (the mother of the muses). "Sculpture, Painting, and Music," a story by the young poet Venevitinov, illustrates the general feeling that the arts were all divinely inspired. The three arts are depicted as three celestial virgins with a common mother, Poetry, of whom the whole world is an expressive creation. In a similar vein stands Odoevsky's idea that "poetry is the number, music the measure and painting the weight" of a common truth.81 Similarly, the story "Three Artists" by Stankevich, the philosopher-artist who dominated the philosophical life of the thirties as much as Odoevsky had the twenties, told of three brothers trying to capture "the eternal beauty of mother nature" in different media, each inspiring the other until at last
"the three lives flowed into one life, the three arts into beauty . . . and an invisible force was in their midst."82
This sense of divine interdependence of all art media was of great importance for the creative artists of Nicholaevan Russia. Artists in one medium generally knew those working in others. It was customary for poets to draw pictures and for artists to write poems in the notebooks that they kept and exchanged. The Ukrainian poet Taras, Shevchenko began his career as a painter, and Lermontov left behind almost as many paintings and sketches as poems.83 His Demon later inspired Rubinstein's opera of the same name (one of the most popular of the many Russian operas that remain virtually unknown abroad), and many of the best canvases of Vrubel (one of the best of the many painters who also remain little known outside of Russia). Briullov's painting, "The Last Days of Pompeii," was inspired by an opera, and in turn inspired the novel of Bulwer-Lytton. Odoevsky as a music critic and Botkin as an art critic acquired positions of general influence almost as great as those of the literary critics (and were themselves creative writers).
Poetry was viewed, at least until the late thirties, as the first and greatest of the art forms: "the first-born daughter of the deathless spirit, the holy hand-maiden of eternal elegance, nothing less than the most perfect harmony."84 Such flowery tributes seem not altogether inappropriate; for the 1,820's and 1830's were the golden age of Russian verse. In the quantity of good poetry and the quality of its best, Russia drew equal to any other nation of Europe and far ahead of anything in its own past. The greatest of all, Alexander Pushkin, represents in poetry what his ill-fated Decembrist friends represented in politics: the final flowering of eighteenth-century aristocratic aspiration. But, whereas the Decembrists came to an inglorious end and had little impact on subsequent political thought, Pushkin was lionized even in his lifetime, and sounded forth many of the themes that were to dominate a rich literary culture in the late imperial period. His extraordinary success helped attract gifted Russians to art as a kind of alternative to politics during the reactionary period that followed the crushing of the Decembrists.
From a background of privilege and a largely French, neo-classical education at the newly founded imperial lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, Pushkin grew continually in the range and depth of his interests. Within his relatively brief life of thirty-eight years, he wrote plays, stories, and poems with equal facility about a wide variety of times and places. His most influential work was the "novel in verse" Eugene Onegin. Its portrayal of provincial aristocratic life and its muted tale of unfulfillment made it "the real ancestor of the main line of Russian fiction," while "superfluous" Onegin and the
lovely Tatiana became "the authentic Adam and Eve of the Mankind that inhabits Russian fiction."85 One of his last poems, The Bronze Horseman, is probably the greatest ever written in the Russian language. A much shorter and more intense work than Onegin, The Bronze Horseman struck a resonant chord in the Russian apocalyptical mentality with its central image of a flood descending on St. Petersburg without any ark of salvation. Drawing on his own memories of the flood in 1824, Pushkin transforms Falconet's bronze statue of Peter the Great into an ambiguous symbol of imperial majesty and inhuman power. The clerk Eugene, in whose final delirium the statue comes to life, became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction-pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone control.
Pushkin remains the outstanding illustration of Russian aristocratic culture. In his hands, Russian poetry came close to Nadezhdin's ideal synthesis of classical and romantic elements; the Russian language attained an elegance and precision that was at last devoid of affectation; and the famous "broad Russian nature" was combined with the classical virtues of clarity and disciplined moderation. For all his breadth of interest and subject matter, Pushkin was a different temperament from the Shakespeare with whom Russians often compare him. His was not the "golden uncontrolled enfranchisement" of the Elizabethans but rather the fulfillment of the oft-maligned aristocratic ideaclass="underline" disinterested curiosity freed from dilettantism; ranging sympathies freed from condescension; and honest self-awareness freed from morbid introspection.
For a poet with natural musicality, it seems appropriate that Pushkin wrote about music and musicians and had so much of his own work adapted for the musical stage.86 There is a kind of compatibility between the grace of his verse and that of the imperial ballet, which by the 1820's had surpassed all others in Europe. During thirty of Pushkin's thirty-eight years thjs^aUet was directed by Charles Didelot, the first of the great Russian impresario-choreo^apHeTsTHe^mkeTplishkin's work, and Pushkin found fresh inspiration for his poetry in one of Didelot's greatest ballerinas, Istomina.87 The verses of Pushkin and the movements of Istomina gave Russians a new confidence that they were capable of surpassing the West not only in primitive combat but also in sophisticated cultural accomplishment.
For all his genius and symbolic importance, however, Pushkin did not affect the path of Russian cultural development as much as many lesser writers.
He exerted, it is true, a vast influence on Russian literature, but almost none on the history of Russian thought, of Russian spiritual cul-
ture. In me mneteenm century ana generally ?? oui own umcs, rvussiau thought and spiritual culture has followed another, non-Pushkinian path.88
Pushkin was a relatively unpolemical writer, a man of shifting interests, tantalizing fragments, and elusive opinions. Yet he gradually developed an outlook that can be characterized as conservative in social and political matters and liberal in the realm of spiritual and creative culture. After a youth of many love affairs and close contact with Decembrists and other romantic reformers, he became a supporter of autocracy in the 1820's and a half-domesticated paterfamilias in the 1830's. He had always shared the aristocratic distaste for the vulgarity and capriciousness of the common horde. He was skeptical about the possibilities of democracy in America, and tended to praise great men-Peter the Great, Lomonosov, and even at times Napoleon-who had disregarded majority opinion in order to lift standards and advance culture. Always a monarchist, he hailed Nicholas I in more cordial terms than he had Alexander I; praised Peter and derided his Ukrainian foe Mazeppa in his Poltava of 1829; and endorsed the crushing of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Increasingly, he felt reverence for continuity and tradition. Violent change of any sort, he came to feel, would bring forth an inescapable revenge of fate-just as uncontrolled excess in poetry produces an imbalance that destroys true art. Pushkin was horrified by the terror of the French Revolution, and inveighed against the unleashed fury of the mob in his own major historical work of the early 1830's, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion.