【In-depth interpretation】
Author: Wang Jianzhao is a professor at Beijing University of Foreign Chinese
In Russia, pushkin's surname is a household name, and it even goes beyond the realm of poetry to be linked to a high degree of national pride and culture. However, most Chinese readers may not know that the original meaning of the word "Pushkin" is "cannon", and it is interesting that part of the "cannon barrel" is a sonorous rose, and part of the aftersound left by the "roar" is the singing of the nightingale. Today, Pushkin has become the country's calling card, a mythical presence. If you travel to Russia, tourists who know Pushkin and tourists who don't know Pushkin, they will certainly be treated differently.
Pushkin. Profile picture
A museum of plastic arts named after the poet. Profile picture
Pushkin Monument. Profile picture
Childhood and schooling
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born on June 6, 1799, to an aristocratic family in Moscow. Although the family's door is not too low, it is not particularly prominent. His father, Sergei, a retired officer who was an avid French writer, often displayed outstanding talent in various salons, casually throwing out a series of French puns and writing warm and intellectual verses in photo albums and souvenir books of the ladies. He loved drama and would read Molière's works to his children. The mother's family has a legendary background, and its distant ancestor is Peter the Great's famous black slave Hannibal. In other words, the poet still has African blood flowing on his body.
Two people who played a crucial role in Pushkin's upbringing were Uncle Vasily and Nurse Alina Rodionovna. Vasily was gentle and knowledgeable, and most importantly, he was also an excellent poet, with whom he had good personal contacts with some of the famous poets of the time, such as Karamsin, Zhukovsky, and Bakashkov. He once taught his nephew how to write poetry in Russian. Later, as a sign of respect and gratitude, Pushkin referred to him as "my poetic father." Alina had long been freed from the identity of a slave girl, but still chose to stay in the master's home to serve, she brought the simplicity, freshness and frankness of the folk to the little Pushkin, told him fairy tales, hummed folk songs. Pushkin was grateful to her throughout his life and wrote many lyric poems to praise and remember her.
In addition, in childhood, there was another person who had an influence on poets, and that was his maternal grandmother. She is adept at telling historical stories and sometimes telling her grandson some anecdotes about her family. What she told inspired Pushkin's sense of honor and fostered his deep interest in romance and legend.
Pushkin loved to read from an early age, and it is said that he had already read Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, at the age of 10. In such a family atmosphere, Pushkin did not need to worry about being regarded as a wanderer because he wrote poetry, and his family would never reject his passion for the cause. He is like a good seed, falling on the fertile soil, and the final flowering fruit is a natural deduction of time. At this point, one of his poetic heirs, Anna Akhmatova, known as the "Moon of Russian Poetry," was not so lucky, and the poetess's father thought that writing poetry would tarnish the surname Golenko, so much so that she could only choose one surname from her mother's distant ancestor, Akhmat, when publishing her work.
In October 1811, Pushkin entered the Imperial Village School. However, Pushkin did not belong to the hegemonic students, and the teacher at the time commented on him: "His talent is far better than his basic skills, and his thinking is more exuberant and sensitive, but not profound enough." He has average learning initiative" and is "very lazy, inattentive and troublemakers in class". Pushkin's subjects such as law, history, geography, and mathematics were very average. But, perhaps influenced by his father, his best grades were Russian literature, French literature, and fencing. Interestingly, because of his ability in French and his profound knowledge of French literature, he was even jokingly called "Frenchman" by his classmates.
Pushkin gained his first poetic fame also at the Imperial Village School. On January 8, 1815 (old calendar), the Imperial Village School held a language examination. During the examination, Pushkin was assigned to recite a poem of his own, which aroused the admiration of the court poet of the time, Jerchavin. Pushkin wrote about the incident: "I stood two steps away from Jerchavin and read aloud my poem "Memories of the Imperial Village." I can't describe my own mood at the time: when I recited the line of poetry that mentioned Jerchavin's name, my adolescent voice became hoarse and awkward, and my heart beat irrepressibly and ecstatically... I don't remember how I ended the recitation, or where I went. Jer Chavin was very pleased; he called me over and wanted to hug me... However, after looking for half a day, I was not found. It was through this occasion that the old poet declared: "The second Jerchavin has appeared in the world: he is Pushkin." In terms of Jerchavin's position in the literary world at that time, such an evaluation is not high, but what he does not seem to expect is that it is not "the second Jergavin", but Pushkin, who built a "non-artificial monument" for himself.
2. Poetry creation
After graduating from the Imperial Village School, Pushkin entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a tenth-class civil servant. The unruly poet did not have much interest in his career, and he devoted more energy to poetry. In his short life, he left behind nearly 800 lyric poems, 12 long poems, and 1 poetic novel. In Pushkin's entire creation, the most emblematic of Pushkin's personality and bones is his political lyric poems, for example: "Memories of the Imperial Village" has a strong poetic meaning, the whole poem is neat in form, the language is solemn, the sound is sonorous, full of strong patriotic spirit and praise for peace; "Prophet", "Arion", "The Poet", etc. expound the poet's sense of mission, responsibility for mankind and the world; "To Chadayev" and "The Countryside" express the yearning for idealism and the scorn for vulgar life; "Ode to Freedom", "To the Sea", "To the Sea", "The Poet", etc. expound the poet's sense of mission and the responsibility of mankind and the world; "To Chadayev" and "The Countryside" express the yearning for idealism and the scorn for vulgar life; "Ode to Freedom", "To the Sea", "To the Sea", "The Poet", etc. The Prisoner, Deep in the Mines of Siberia, etc., attacked the tyranny and tyranny of Tsarist Russia and expressed their yearning for freedom and individual life.
Pushkin left a large number of unique love poems, according to the statistics of people with hearts, Pushkin's love poems have about 200. Back in the Imperial Village School, Pushkin fell in love with a woman named Natalia and wrote the following sentence for her: "For the first time, I was shyly/obsessed with the charm of women. / All day, no matter how hard I try, / I can't get rid of your occupation of me. It was in this early work that Pushkin discovered that love is not only sweet, but also more likely to be painful and sad.
Among the many love poems, the most well-known is the song "I Remember That Wonderful Moment". One day in July 1825, when Pushkin was saying goodbye to his girlfriend Kane, he gave her the first chapter of the newly published Yevgeny Onegin, which contained a poem, "I Remember the Wonderful Moment": "I remember that wonderful moment: / I saw you in front of me, / As if a fleeting illusion, / As if the pure spirit." In addition to expressing her sincere admiration, the poem also emphasizes that beauty can dispel the gloom in the heart, awaken the sleeping soul, and help to spiritually motivate and enhance the world. Later, the composer Glinka composed it into a romantic song. When the art critic Serov heard this, he couldn't help but exclaim: "This is a complete epic of love." ”
Another widely disseminated love poem by Pushkin is "I Loved You". It is a love song about lost love, but it reflects not decadence and decay, but a kind of selflessness and nobility of love: "I have loved you, loved so sincerely, so warmly, / God bless, I hope others can love you like this." 」 Reading such works, we can understand that love not only comes from physical impulses, but also from spiritual fit, it is the evoking of beauty and ideals, and it is the embodiment of a noble sentiment.
In addition, Pushkin's landscape poetry has always been praised, and he has used words to build a colorful poetry garden for us, recreating a vibrant nature. Interestingly, Pushkin once claimed in a poem that he did not like spring because "the dirty smell of spring makes me sick; / Blood is rushing; emotions and reason are suffocated by sorrow." The poet's artistic talent is particularly evident in his depictions of autumn and winter: "Dear reader, I prefer late autumn, / Its shimmering beauty is so idyllic, so docile. / It's like a child in the family who no one loves, / but it wins my heart ("Autumn"). "A hustle and bustle; the reed flute of the field / Breaking the tranquility of my seclusion, / Accompanied by the lovely shadow of the lover, / The last dream drifts away ("Autumn Morning")." "Just like that, enduring the cold of late autumn, / as if hearing the roar of a winter storm, / Like a dying leaf, alone / trembling on the bare branches ('I'll Never Expect Anything More)'" "Through the undulating mist of the waves, / A moon flashes, / In the glade in the sad forest, / It sprinkles a sad light (The Winter Road)." "Cold and sun: wonderful day! / Charming friend, you are still asleep -/ It is time, Beauty, wake up:/ Open your eyes that have been closed by tranquility, / As a star from the north, / Meet the goddess of dawn in the north ("Winter Morning")! ”
Pushkin also created a number of philosophical poems, for whom poetry is also an important entrance to his exploration of the mysteries of life, and many works have profound connotations of life experience and perception. Among them, the most well-known and inspirational is "If Life Deceives You", in addition, "Bliss", "Truth", "The Cart of Life" and so on are also famous pieces in Russian philosophical poetry.
With the publication and dissemination of each poem, he soon became one of the most important poets in Russia, so much so that even the Tsar knew that his poetry was circulating everywhere in the Russian land. At that time, one of his admirers, Fedor Glinka, once exclaimed, "Ah, Pushkin, Pushkin!" Who taught you to confuse beings with that extraordinary Psalm? ”
Third, the attempt at a variety of literary genres
To the surprise of Chinese readers, Pushkin, who is regarded as a great man of Russian poetry, is not very tall, only five feet six inches tall, a messy black hair, a pair of gray-blue eyes, long nails, and always dirty, with hands like the claws of a bird. He often wandered the streets, wearing a double-breasted black gown and a bolivarian top hat with a bulky rattan tied to it and a pair of narrow breeches underneath. Even so, in May 1830, Pushkin won the hearts of Natalia Goncharova, the first beauty of Moscow, with his talent.
In the autumn of that year, in preparation for the wedding, Pushkin came to Bolkino, his father's territory, to go through the formalities for the transfer of the property. He had planned to stay there for a week or so. Unexpectedly, a sudden cholera outbreak occurred in the area, which forced him to stay for three months. Porkino's climate is pleasant, the scenery is beautiful, and he is relatively isolated from the world, and he can get rid of entertainment and daily affairs. Coupled with the sense of responsibility as a fiancé, all this allowed Pushkin to enter a creative blowout period.
During his three months of unexpected detention, he excelled in attempts at a variety of literary genres. He wrote nearly thirty lyric poems (including "Demons", "Lamentations", "Autumn", "Heroes", "For the Coast of a Distant Motherland", etc.), in which he used musical words to express the sadness of farewell to youth and love, the intoxication of the beauty of nature, as well as the criticism of the shortcomings of the times and the exposure of social injustice.
In addition to his poetry, he completed five novellas – The Coffin Maker, Miss Village Girl, Shooting, Stationmaster, and Blizzard. Most of these novels are based on legends, history, memories and the author's daily experiences, and their styles are very different and independent, including Gothic legends, displays of customs and customs, and frustrated love stories. In October of the following year, Pushkin published a single collection of them. In this collection of novels, he refers to himself only as a publisher, pretending to be the "late Ivan Petrovich Belkin". When asked who the author really was, he replied, "Whoever he is, you need to write a novel like this: simple, concise, and clear." Most of them depict the difficulties of survival and the conflicts and contradictions that occur between people, and there is a strong humanitarian spirit running through them, especially the "Stationmaster", the poet portrays the image of Verin, a kind, bullied inferior person, with a sympathetic pen and ink, just as he created the image of the "superfluous" of Russian literature in "Evgeny Onegin", in which he created a tradition of "small people". Later, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov all inherited and carried forward this tradition. As one critic put it: "The Stationmaster declares that realism in the social psychology will develop unprecedentedly in the Classical Russian novel." ”
In addition, he completed the last two chapters of the poetic novel Yevgeni Onegin, four minor tragedies, The Miserly Knight, The Stone Guest, Mozart and Saleri, The Banquet in The Time of Cholera Epidemic, the fairy tale poem The Story of the Priest and His Long-Time Worker Barda, The Story of the Mother Bear, and several literary criticism and temporal essays. Polkino can be said to be a blessed land for Pushkin, where he also created two "Autumns of Polkino" in 1833 and 1834, where he wrote masterpieces such as The Bronze Knight, Othello, The Story of the Fisherman and the Goldfish, and The Queen of Spades.
Death and rebirth
Pushkin and Goncharova were married in Moscow on February 18, 1831. It is said that on the eve of their marriage, he also held a bachelor party with friends. Vyzemski also improvised a poem for this purpose, in which he said, "Pushkin! Tomorrow you're going to get married/say goodbye, single life! / Throw the bachelor's cup to the ground / Don't wait until tomorrow to light an empty pill bag..." Pushkin was sad that night and never said a word.
The next day, he got up early to meet his fiancée. A week after his marriage, he wrote to his friend Pletniov: "I am married – and very happy, and my only wish is that there will be no change in my life – and I cannot imagine a better life." This state was completely new to me, and I even felt like I was born again. Soon he moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg. However, family life did not bring the poet the peace and happiness expected, and the various social and social activities that followed occupied a large part of the time. What is even more embarrassing is that Goncharova is tall and beautiful, and the couple has left a lesser and less matched image, and some people even think that the couple is a bit like Venus and Vulcan (the Vulcan god in Roman mythology, mentally inferior, and disabled). It is said that his wife's beauty even attracted the attention of Tsar Nicholas I, who, in order to see her frequently at court balls, gave Pushkin a position as a court attendant. In 1836, the French aristocrat Dantes, who had gone into exile in Russia, began to pursue Goncharova with impunity. Soon, word spread among the high society of Petersburg.
Pushkin, who had a strong personality, obviously could not stand such insults. On February 8, 1837 (January 27 in the Old Calendar), pushkin engaged in a duel with Dantes in a birch forest next to Black Creek on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. The conditions of the duel are very harsh, the distance between the two sides is only ten meters, and if the first shot is inconclusive, the duel will continue. This means that death is almost inevitable. That afternoon, aides took the two sides twenty paces away and handed them their pistols. Dantes was the first to shoot, hitting Pushkin in the abdomen, who, after being injured, still fired a bullet of his own right, which also hit his opponent. Dantes was only slightly injured, and a button or thick belt on his chest saved his life. Two days later, Pushkin left the world he had once been madly attached to.
As a memorial, the Pushkin Memorial in Petersburg's Moika River keeps the pendulum forever at 2:45 p.m. The first obituary to be published was the Literary Supplement of the Russian Newspaper of Disabled Soldiers. The obituary, written by Odoevsky, reads as follows: "The sun of our poetry has set!" Pushkin died, at a prosperous age, halfway through his literary career! ...... We have no power to say anything more, and we need not say anything more; every Russian heart understands the value of this irreparable loss; every Russian heart is torn apart. Pushkin! Our poets! Our joy, the glory of our nation! ...... Did we really lose Pushkin? ...... It's unimaginable! ”
Hearing this bad news, Chutchev wrote a eulogy under the title of "January 29, 1837": "The heart of Russia will never forget you, / As if to remember your first love!" Another great poet, Lermontov, wrote "The Death of the Poet" in grief: "The poet has sacrificed! - Prisoner of this honor -/ Fall, wounded by gossip, / Swallow lead bullets in the chest and the desire for revenge, / The proud head hangs down! In the poem, he denounced the shamelessness of the high society at that time and the horror of the vulgar rumors, and thus announced the birth of his poetic life. The death of the poet can bring new life, which may be the special charm of poetry, and the author, who was once captured by honor, turns the reader into a prisoner of beauty and truth, giving them the ability to experience every life like a sweet first love.
Guangming Daily (2019-06-06 edition 13)