Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz Goethe, Turgenev and Sienkiewicz

272 Pages·1956·4.183 MB·English

by  Wacław Lednicki (auth.)

BITS OF TABLE TALK ON PUSHKIN, MICKIEWICZ
GOETHE, TURGENEV, AND SIENKIEWICZ
INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS
FORUM
A SERIES OF BOOKS BY
i
AMERICAN SCHOLARS
5
ADVISORY BOARD
J. ANTON DE HAAS
Professor of International Relations at Claremont Men's College
PHILIP MUNZ
Director of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden
WILLIAM T. JONES
Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College
EDWARD WEISMILLER
Associate Professor of English, Pomona College
FREDERICK HARD
President of Scripps College
DAVID DAVIES
Librarian of the Honnold Library
of
Bits Table Talk on
PUSHKIN, MICKIEWICZ
GOETHE, TURGENEV
AND SIENKIEWICZ
by
WACLAW LEDNICKI
University of California
I I
MARTINUS NIJHOFF -- THE HAGUE
1956
ISBN 978-94-015-1753-9 ISBN 978-94-015-2908-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-2908-2
Copyright 1956 by Martinus NijhojJ, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in atry form
Soft cover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1956
PREFACE
Table Talk was the title Pushkin gave, following the example of
William Hazlitt or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the collection of
historical anecdotes jotted down in the years 1830-1836. Pushkin had
in his library the T able Talk of both Hazlitt and Coleridge. The
question which book prompted his own title has been much discussed.
There can be no doubt that Coleridge occupies a very important
position in the list of literary sources which Puskhin utilized. It is
curious that in the fall of 1830 at Boldino, hence at the period of his
greatest literary activity, when he composed a number of his most
splendid masterpieces, Puskhin had Coleridge's works with him; not
only had his works, but read them anew. Among the Boldino master
pieces was also, as we know, the famous "little tragedy" Mozart and
Salieri, of which the ultimate psychological-moral peripeteia revolves
about Mozart's remark that "genius and crime are two incompati
ble things" - "geny i zlodeystvo dve veschi nesovmestnye ... " When I
looked through Coleridge's Table Talk I was struck with the following
observation, under the date of the 29th of August, 1827: "genius may
co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime: but not long,
believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition.
Envy is kdkistos kai dikai6tatos the6s, as I once saw expressed some
where in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its worshippers."
The entire, absolutely the entire, theme of Mozart and Salieri is included
in this aphorism of Coleridge! The difficulty, however, in connecting
this text of Coleridge with Pushkin's "little tragedy," the difficulty
in establishing an affiliation, lies in the fact that Coleridge's Table Talk
was first published in the year 1835!1
*
* *
This collection consists of essays which are in their essence dedicated
to comparative literary studies. Only here and there do they touch
upon any ideological problems and from this point of view this book
is a kind of pendant or, rather, a complement to my book, Russia,
1 See B. L. Modzalevskij, Biblioteka A. S. Pu§kina, Pu§kin i ego sovremenniki,
vyp. IX-X (Petersburg, 1910), p. 198 - Nos. 760-761; SPecimens of tke Table Talk
of tke late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two volumes (London, 1836); Tke Poetical Works
of Coleridge, Skelley, and Keats, complete in one volume (Paris, 1829), p. 246, Nos.
973-974; Tke Spirit oftke Age: or Contemporary Portraits, William Hazlitt (Paris, 1825);
William Hazlitt, Table Talk, or Original Essays (Paris, 1825); see N. Yakovlev: "Iz
razyskanij 0 literatumykh istocnikakh vtvoreestve Puskina," Pu§kin v mirovoj literature,
sbornik statej (Gos. Izd., 1926). pp. 137-145 and 370-376. I have quoted Coleridge's
text according to the Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, arranged and
edited by T. Ashe, B. A. (London, 1905), p. 56.
VI PREFACE
Poland and the West, in which the ideological approach is predominant.
This is one of the reasons why I decided to publish the present studies
together in one book.
The present essays were written in various periods of my life. Some
of them appeared formerly in Polish and in French before the Second
World War and then later were translated into English and published
in The American Slavic and East European Review ("Pushkin's Tazit
and Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod", The Snowstorm, "The Nest of
Gentlefolk and the 'Poetry of Marriage and the Hearth"'). Some of
them were written in America between 1940 and 1954, mostly published
only in English ("Mickiewicz at the College de France," "The Prose of
Pushkin," in The Slavonic and East European Review; "Ex Oriente
Lux" in Semitic and Oriental Studies, Vol. XI, University of California
Press; "Goethe and the Russian and Polish Romantics," in Comparative
Literature; "Pushkin's 'Monument'" under the title of "Grammatici
Certant" in Harvard Slavic Studies, Vol. II). The study on Pushkin's
prose also appeared in Russian in the Russian review N ovy Zhurnal.
Some of them were published by the Polish Institute of Arts and
Sciences in New York (Henryk Sienkiewicz and "Mickiewicz - Poland's
Romantic Ambassador to the Court of Realism"). I should like to
express my thanks to the editors of The Slavonic and East European
Review, The American Slavic and East European Review, Comparative
Literature, to the University of California Press, the Harvard University
Press, and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America for
their kind authorization for the re-publication of my studies in this
book, as well as to Random House and George Bell and Sons, Ltd.
for their permission to quote the passage from Pushkin's Snowstorm.
I am particularly grateful to the Humanities Fund, Incorporated,
of New York, which made it possible for me to have this book
published.
Some of these essays represent the text of public lectures given at
various times on various occasions. The study, "Mickiewicz at the
College de France," is a revised version of a lecture delivered in
December, 1940, at Harvard and Columbia Universities and in
January, 1941, at Vassar College in commemoration of the centennial
of the inauguration of Mickiewicz's chair of "Slavic Language and
Literature" at the College de France (December 22, 1840). "Goethe
and the Russian and Polish Romantics" is based on a lecture delivered
on May 29, 1950, in the series organized by the German Department
of the University of California in Berkeley commemorating the bi
centennial of Goethe's birth. "Adam Mickiewicz - Poland's Romantic
PREFACE VII
Ambassador to the Court of Realism" derived from a lecture given
at the special session of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in
New York held at Columbia University on May 12, 1954, dedicated
to the celebration of the bi-centennial of Columbia University. It was
conceived as a lecture signalizing the then forthcoming centennial of
Mickiewicz's death (November 26, 1855). The essay on Sienkiewicz
originated from a lecture in commemoration of the centennial of
Sienkiewicz's birth delivered at one of the sessions of the Modern
Language Association in Washington, D.C. in December, 1946. All of
these studies, as well as those previously mentioned, have been
revised and supplemented with additional documentation and biblio
graphical information.
In most of these essays I was able to give an expression of pure
admiration for great masterpieces of literary art. But affection for
literature and for comparativism are not the only ties which exist
among these studies. The interweaving of themes appearing in the
works of authors whom I discuss creates, I believe, a certain unity
which binds my essays together. I am happy that this book will appear
in the year that marks the centennial of Adam Mickiewicz's death,
the year 1955, as the great Polish poet occupies an important place
in my literary speculations. I may add here that the studies dedicated
to Mickiewicz and Pushkin complement my monograph on Pushkin's
Bronze H orseman1 and the study which will appear in the Symposium
Mickiewicz in World Literature.2
*
* *
In my footnotes, while transcribing Russian names and words, I have
followed the principle of transliteration as the only consistent one.
In the text itself, taking into consideration that the average reader is
unaccustomed to the technique of transliteration, I have accepted
popular transcription, while still trying to remain as close as possible
to the system of transliteration, avoiding phonetic transcription and
aiming at general simplification. This method has been applied to
all studies in this book with the exception of "Pushkin's 'Monument'''.
The strict analysis of words used by Pushkin implied here the
necessity of employing transliteration in the main text as well. In
general, all foreign terms have been italicized with the exception of
quotations of a larger size.
Berkeley, California
June, 1955
1 WaclawLednicki,Pushkin's Bl'onzBHol'SBman (University of California Press. 1955).
2 To be published in 1956 by University of California Press.
CONTENTS
Preface v
I. The Prose of Pushkin . 1
II. The Snowstorm . ... 33
III. The Nest of Gentlefolk and the "Poetry of Marriage
and the Hearth" . . . 60
IV. Pushkin's "Monument" 87
V. Adam Mickiewicz: Poland's Romantic Ambassador to
the Court of Realism . . . . . . . 111
VI. Mickiewicz at the College de France . . . 132
VII. Ex Oriente Lux (Mickiewicz and Pushkin) . 157
VIII. Pushkin's Tazit and Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod 180
IX. Goethe and the Russian and Polish Romantics . 198
X. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1946)
A Vanished Glory 220
The Lighthouse. . 224
The Positivist . . 232
Letters from America 235
The Trilogy . . . . 236
Without Dogma and The Polaniecki Family. 242
Quo Vadis? and The Teutonic Knights 249
Politics and Morality . . . . . . . . . 251
Sienkiewicz as I saw him then and now . 253
Index .. 257
CHAPTER I
THE PROSE OF PUSH KIN
When Vladimir Soloviev, in his famous article "The Role of Poetry
in the Verses of Pushkin," compared Pushkin to Byron and Mickie
wicz and pointed out that "in some ways one may prefer" the two latter
to the former, inasmuch as "Byron and Mickiewicz were more signifi
cant than he" -"Byron surpassed Pushkin by the intensity of his
self-consciousness and self-assertion ... Mickiewicz was greater than
Pushkin in the depth of his religious feeling, the earnestness of his moral
demands on personal and national life, the loftiness of his mystical
conceptions and, above all, in his constant tendency to subordinate all
personal and everyday things to that which he deemed absolutely im
perative"- he supported by this comparison his fundamental view
of Pushkin, namely, that "Pushkin remains a poet par excellence, a
more genuine exponent of pure poetry than all the others. "1 The quali
ties of Byron and Mickiewicz, said Soloviev, "were such that they
would have found expression one way or another, even if these two
mighty men had not written a single line of poetry." "And since they
were, moreover, poets by the grace of God, and poets of genius, the
dominant aspects of their personalities over and above their general
significance naturally found expression also in their poetry .... " But
"Byron and Mickiewicz brought in a content which, significant though
it was, was not however essential to poetry as such .... " "Pushkin never
had such a dominant central content of personality, but he simply had
an eager, open soul, unusually receptive and responsive to all-and
nothing more. The only great and important thing that he knew him
self to posseis was his creative gift; it is clear that he could not contri
bute anything of his own that was of universal significance to poetry,
which remained with him pure poetry, receiving its content not from
outside, but from itself. "2 As usual, Soloviev brilliantly and precisely
1 Incidentally, the same view was expressed by Belinsky: "Pushkin was primarily a
poet, an artist: he could not have been anything else because of his nature." Cf. V.G.
Belinskij. Izbf'annye soCinenija (Moscow. 1947). p. 523.
• v. Solov·ev. Sobf'anie socinenij (Petersburg. 1911). Vol. IX. pp. 296-298.