Fairy tales: Ruslán and Ludmíla

One of his earliest productions, written almost immediately after he left school, was Ruslán and Ludmíla, a fairy tale, which he put in beautiful verse. The dominating element of this poem is that wonderland where “a green oak stands on the sea-beach, and a learned cat goes round the oak, — to which it is attached by a golden chain, — singing songs when it goes to the left, and telling tales when it goes to the right.” It is the wedding day of Ludmila, the heroine; the long bridal feast comes at last to an end, and she retires with her husband; when all of a sudden comes darkness, thunder resounds, and in the storm Ludmíla disappears. She has been carried away by the terrible sorcerer from the Black Sea — a folk-lore allusion, of course, to the frequent raids of the nomads of Southern Russia. Now, the unhappy husband, as also three other young men, who were formerly suitors of Ludmíla, saddle their horses and go in search of the vanished bride. From their experiences the tale is made up, and it is full of both touching passages and very humorous episodes. After many adventures, Ruslán recovers his Ludmíla, and everything ends to the general satisfaction, as folk-tales always do. The great composer Glínka has made of this fairy tale a most beautiful opera (Rustán I Ludmíla), in which Russian, Finnish, Turkish, and Oriental music are intermingled in order to characterise the different heroes. ¹⁰

This was a most youthful production of Púshkin, but its effect in Russia was tremendous. Classicism, i.e. the pseudoclassicism which reigned then, was defeated for ever. Everyone wanted to have the poem, everyone retained in memory of whole passages and even pages from it, and with this tale the modern Russian literature — simple, realistic in its descriptions, modest in its images and fable, earnest and slightly humouristic — was created. In fact, one could not imagine a greater simplicity in verse than that which Púshkin had already obtained in this poem. But to give an idea of this simplicity to English readers remains absolutely impossible so long as the poem is not translated by some very gifted English poet. Suffice it to say that, while its verses are wonderfully musical, it contains not one single passage in which the author has resorted to unusual or obsolete words — to any words, indeed, but those which everyone uses in common conversation.

Thunders came upon Púshkin from the classical camp when this poem made its appearance. We have only to think of the Daphnes and the Chloes with which poetry used to be embellished at that time, and the sacerdotal attitude which the poet took towards his readers, to understand how the classical school was offended at the appearance of a poet who expressed his thoughts in beautiful images, without resorting to any of these embellishments, who spoke the language which everyone speaks, and related adventures fit for the nursery. With one cut of his sword Púshkin had freed literature from the ties which were keeping it enslaved.

The tales which he had heard from his old nurse gave him the matter, not only for Ruslán and Ludmíla, but also for a series of popular tales, of which the verses are so natural that as soon as you have pronounced one word that word calls up immediately the next, and this the following, because you cannot say the thing otherwise than in the way in which Púshkin has told it. “Is it not exactly so that tales should be told?” was asked all over Russia; and, the reply being in the affirmative, the fight against pseudo-classicism was won forever.

This simplicity of expression characterised Púshkin in everything he afterwards wrote. He did not depart from it, even when he wrote about so-called elevated subjects, nor in the passionate of philosophical monologues of his latest dramas. It is what makes Púshkin so difficult to translate into English; because, in the English literature of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth is the only poet who has written with the same simplicity. But, while Wordsworth applied this simplicity mainly to the description of the lovely and quiet English landscape, Púshkin spoke with the same simplicity of human life, and his verses continued to flow, as easy as prose and as free from artificial expressions, even when he described the most violent human passions. In his contempt of everything exaggerated and theatrical, and in his determination to have nothing to do with “the lurid tragic actor who wields a cardboard sword,” he was thoroughly Russian: and at the same time he powerfully contributed towards establishing, in both the written literature and on the stage, that taste for simplicity and honest expression of feeling of which so many examples will be given in the course of this book.