Translated material
Workaround maneuver
Beating the average writer with Pushkin is a stupid thing to do. Therefore, I will remain silent about the “quality” of Stakhov’s style, about the banality of his play with the original source (the newly minted Dubrovsky-Deforge demonstrates heroism not in a duel with a bear, but in disarming a grenade ready to explode), about the talkativeness of the author, concerned not with the semantic, but with the physical volume of his “action film” , about an elementary misunderstanding of the essence of the plot (Stakhov’s innovation is that Masha did not become the wife of Prince Vereisky - this is how the tragic conflict, without which there is no Pushkin novel, is annulled). Only one thing is really interesting here. If we take the author's thirst for success (royalty) out of the equation, I cannot understand why Stakhov wrote The General's Daughter. And why Pushkin composed “Dubrovsky” - I somehow understand.
Pushkin constantly worked with other people's subjects. And in different ways. For example, in “Belkin’s Tales” he played with literally all world literature (from Shakespeare to “half-true” magazine stories). In "The Stone Guest" the "eternal plot" was varied. In “Angelo,” condensing Shakespeare’s dark comedy “Measure for Measure,” he revealed what he considered its priceless essence. In the unfinished “Roslavlev” he deliberately polemicized against Zagoskin’s novel of the same name. In “The Captain's Daughter,” translating, so to speak, Walter Scott’s “combined” novel into the Russian register, he rethought the historical concept of the “Scottish sorcerer” (because he believed that our history requires a “different formula”)... And into the “robber novel” “The motif of the hero’s “double existence” (Deforge by day, Dubrovsky by night) came from the fashionable story “Jean Sbogar” by Charles Nodier. But for all that, Pushkin wrote his own . Regardless of what his contemporaries thought about his achievements, most of them “didn’t smell” Belkin’s Tale. Or not the worst descendants. The poem “Angelo,” which the poet himself considered his best work, did not receive any thoughtful response for more than a century. Why Belinsky treated her with contempt can be understood, but even the thinkers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (from Vladimir Solovyov to Frank), focused on religious and philosophical issues, did not see “Angelo” at all.
Yes, Pushkin wrote his own , and Dubrovsky was no exception. Of course, Pushkin dreamed of writing an exciting adventure novel that could attract a wide audience and at the same time feed the author. He was very upset by the discrepancy with the “democratizing” reader, who willingly consumed and praised plump (money pays for “long reading”), “relevant-advanced”, full of adventures, with at least a twisted plot, clear moralizing and the right amount of “accusatory” opuses of Bulgarin, Grech, Polevoy or Zagoskin. He was in dire need of money. So he built a “readable” (assuming consumer demand) novel, not disdaining either the “robber” plot, or the kidnapping from Nodier, or catchy episodes (like the same scene with the bear), or obvious melodrama. But “Dubrovsky” grew out of Pushkin’s main thoughts. About the fate of Peter's empire. About the fatal role of the “glorious” 1762, when the coup that overthrew Peter III and elevated Catherine, who had no rights to it, to the throne, accelerated the sick process of separation of the “old” - true - nobility and the new - dependent on power, rich and lawless - the aristocracy. (Pushkin gave the noble tyrant the marked “boyar” surname Troekurov, thereby subtly indicating: the difference between the “old” and “new” nobility is not necessarily determined by origin; a person’s self-orientation in the new reality is no less important.) About the (impossibility of) a union of the ancient nobility and serfs. About the specifics of the “Russian revolt”. About the prospects of a country in which similar stories can happen. About honor - male and female. (This is why Masha’s forced marriage and her farewell remark are so significant.) The potential “bestseller” was built on the foundation of Pushkin’s thought - historical, political, ethical. Pushkin did not dilute this thought with “details” and “sideways moves,” that is, contrary to the reader’s preferences, he sacrificed physical volume for the sake of semantic volume. This is what happened with “The Queen of Spades”, a synthetic Hoffmann-Balzac novel, compressed into a “masterful story”, to which Belinsky (he belongs to the definition) denied seriousness and which, to suit the public’s needs, was diligently diluted and developed by theatrical interpreters (from the prince who quickly built the stage version Shakhovsky to the librettists of the brilliant - and militantly anti-Pushkin - opera by Tchaikovsky). But the case of “Dubrovsky” is even more interesting, because Pushkin did not publish the first - completed - part of his most “commercial” work, and postponed work on the continuation. (For a while or forever, we don’t know.) Most likely, he felt that the genre standard contradicted the author’s task. (It seems that for the same reason the novel about the Tsar's Blackamoor was previously abandoned, where the novelistic composition - the birth of an illegitimate black child at the beginning should be echoed by the appearance of the same, but white child at the end - and the gloomy ending determined by it did not make it possible to develop an optimistic concept “the glorious days of Peter.”) And having felt it, I began to look for an artistic strategy that would correspond to the main idea. And he wrote "The Captain's Daughter". Which I didn’t intend to keep under wraps. I was sure that it “came together.”
...The other day I received two greetings. Evgeny Sidorov in “The Banner” (No. 6), in my opinion, judging him and my guild too categorically (“our current criticism does not like literature”), noted that my soul “is not here, not with us, but in the 19th century or, in extreme cases, in the range of the prose of Yuri Tynyanov and the poetry of David Samoilov.” "Literary Gazette" wished your columnist "unfailing critical attention - but not only in relation to the authors he personally likes." I am grateful both to my long-respected senior colleague and to Literaturnaya Gazeta, I understand their reasons, but I cannot agree in both cases. If my soul were only in the 19th century (I don’t give up my love for the classics, as well as for Tynyanov and Samoilov), I wouldn’t break my eyes over today’s dubious texts. Numerous, but not canceling the “piece” ones - those that I personally have - but what else? - cute. More precisely, roads. I have written and will write about them, because sharing the joy of literary success, pointing out to the reader a value that is still unknown to him, which has just appeared, is happiness. And it’s not my fault if it happens rarely (see, however, recent reviews of Maya Kucherskaya’s novel “The God of Rain,” Andrei Dmitriev’s novel “Bay of Joy,” Timur Kibirov’s book “On the Fields of A Shropshire Lad” and the upcoming collection articles by Alexander Dolinin “Pushkin and England”). Well, if you are dealing with something like “The General’s Daughter,” an auto remake of Anatoly Azolsky, who once admired me (“The Outsider” - “New World”, No. 4--5) or a boorish and senseless novel by the much-hyped Alexei Ivanov, the title which I hate to repeat, it’s better to move the conversation aside. Perform a detour maneuver. Towards Pushkin. A writer more modern than many.