The question of identity, important for any individual, acquires particular significance for the self-awareness of a creative writer, and Tynianov makes it clear in his novel that this was a question fundamental in the life of A. Pushkin. As we have already seen, the exotic Gannibals had loomed large in Pushkin’s consciousness ever since he first heard stories about them as a child from his grandmother. He even hoped to publish the full biography of Abram, his maternal great-grandfather.532 Peter the Great’s fledgling, an African who had served five monarchs and ended up in disfavour, could not help but ignite Pushkin’s creative imagination. Tsar Peter was a
530
Trigos, L. (trans., commentary) ‘Creativity and Blackness – a Note on Y. Tynianov’s ‘The Gannibals’’ inUnder the Skies…’, 369-376.
531
The person who put on paper Gannibal’s story.
subject which fascinated Pushkin and to which he kept returning throughout his life. The African’s extraordinary life was a striking example of what Eidel’man called ‘the conjunction of fates’ when family history becomes deeply embedded and entwined with the history of Russia.533 It might be tempting to read Tynianov’s first references to Abram Petrovich in the novel Pushkin as positive, almost approving, if this seemingly narratorial statement were not impregnated with Sergei L’vovich’s thoughts, reflecting his calculations as he considers marrying Abram’s granddaughter.Among the advantages there was the renown attached to her famous grandfather, a ‘friend, rather than a mere valet of the Emperor Peter’ (18). Far from encouraging us to approve of the illustrious African, Tynianov is actually inviting us to view his reputation with some scepticism by keeping the reader constantly balanced on the edge of irresolution and continually on guard against hasty conclusions.
The first impression of Abram’s son, Petr Abramovich, whom we see in the opening chapters of the novel, is unprepossessing, and Tynianov stresses the startling effect on the guests of his ‘uncompromisingly negroid’ features:
В отдалении от них никто не мог вообразить, как желты и черны арапские лица. … Личико его было морщинистое, жеваное, глазки живые, коричневые, кофейные, с темными желтыми белками, как у больных желтухой, а ноздри широки
(35).
Added to the connotations of disease are the simian associations, which curiously foreshadow Aleksandr Pushkin’s own nickname at the Lycée, ‘a mixture of tiger and a monkey’. There are also the constant references to the unattractively reified features, revealing the signs of aging, to the gurgling, guttural sounds that emanated from his throat, to the abruptness of his conversation and manners and an obvious addiction to alcohol. The combination of images is certainly not distinguished or heroic. As a reflection of Abram Gannibal in the person of his son, it is in fact a quite merciless mirror. The implication of hereditary resemblance is strengthened even further when Petr Abramovich declares the baby Pushkin to be ‘the spitting image of his grandfather’(46), the words that make Sergei L’vovich shudder and wince. Tynianov’s old negro [старый арап] reminds the guests of a chapter in the Pushkin family history which their hosts would have preferred to forget: when Sergei L’vovich remarks that Aleksandr has been named after his great-grandfather on the Pushkin side, he bluntly responds – ‘wasn’t his wife stabbed to death?’(37). Here we have the ironic spectacle of both ancestral lines of the poet Pushkin, mother’s and father’s, appearing to disadvantage at exactly the same moment.
Scepticism concerning Abram Gannibal’s supposed nobility and the African principality which Petr Abramovich intends to discover and claim as his own, belongs to Mar’ia
Alekseevna Gannibal, with her pointed questions and remarks, and to a man of letters Karamzin with his historian’s inquiry as to proof of the story, any existing evidence in the form of letters or papers. Tellingly, the mention of papers makes the old negro bristle and become ‘instantly suspicious’: he had spent half his life under investigation for the embezzlement of artillery shells. He manages to sound both boastful and evasive when he claims that his grandfather was an African prince in the Arabian Kingdom of Ethiopia or Abyssinia. But by making him talk of it as if trying to convince himself, Tynianov appears to treat the entire tale of the illustrious ancestor’s nobility with amused cynicism.
The notoriously unreliable German biography (‘верный документ’ in Petr Abramovich’s words!(40)) surfaces in the conversation, together with the story, dismissed by Nabokov, as ridiculous, that Peter the Great brought Abram to Russia as an example to his reluctant nobles of the power and influence of education.534The fact that Abram had a black face would supposedly make the nobles remember him all the better, ‘remember what a great man he developed into’(40). Tynianov punctures this interpretation by making us look at Peter’s ‘impetuous reign’ through the enlightened eyes of Karamzin. In fact, the black child was bought without any particular aim in sight, as one of those curios for which the Emperor had shown a particular liking: giants, dwarfs and negroes, putting Abram in the same category as freaks of nature. It further transpires that the ‘trustworthy German’ in Reval who had compiled Abram’s biography was a pharmacist of the Gannibals’ acquaintance. The narrator informs the reader matter-of-factly, as an obvious reflection of Petr Abramovich’s point of view, that, after the record had been compiled (from the old negro’s own words), the old man summoned his sons, and with the help of the very same pharmacist they had read it and learned it off by heart. The aims and circumstances of the pedigree fabrication are thus laid bare. The whole genealogical exercise was apparently geared towards the practical goal of acquiring noble rank retrospectively:
Петровское время было хлопотливое, и о дворянстве старый арап вспомнил только ко времени Елизаветы, когда все наперерыв стали доказывать благородство своего происхождения (41).
The notion that Abram’s noble origin had simply slipped his mind is as unfeasible as it is ludicrous. It is little wonder that Petr Abramovich is perspiring. The image is further developed of ‘the noise, commotion and irritation that had always arisen around the Gannibals like a skein of hot steam around someone in a bath-house’ (44). By further association the imagery is continued into the nursery scene with the flickering candlelight, the firelight of the
furnace and the steaming tub. Things are literally ‘hotting up’, the alcoholic black man’s eyes turn ‘smoky’, he loses control and creates a drunk and disorderly scene. A general he might be, but his behaviour does not match his supposed high nobility, and even the serfs speak of him with contempt.
Tynianov gives Petr Abramovich a thoroughly seamy background, only marginally better than his brother, Osip’s. He proved useless as Nadezhda Osipovna’s guardian and provided no economic assistance to her, being himself in financial trouble. He was also an adulterer like his brother and, hilariously, intending to lecture him on his immoral behaviour, he ‘found instead a certain affinity between them’ (34). The result was brotherly drinking bouts that went on for weeks. When with artful innocence the narrator says that Petr Abramovich was ‘an artillerist like all the Gannibals’(ibid), he does so in the context of adultery, thereby insinuating that all the Gannibals were artillerists and adulterers. The idea that Tynianov leaves us with is that, in spite of their high military rank, the Gannibals were indeed a tribe of lecherous, mischievous, wasteful and vengeful monkeys. Petr Abramovich keeps up his grudges and in the course of the novel inflicts a spiteful and unnecessary revenge on the unsuspecting Pushkins ‘for all the insults that had ever been inflicted on the Gannibals’(171). Thus, the two sides of the family become warring parties, when Petr Abramovich decides to recover their debts through auctioning ancestral estates, though the trouble had been caused, not by the Pushkins, but by brother Osip’s adulterous passion. As Tynianov puts it, reflecting the Pushkins’ viewpoint, ‘the source of all the trouble, as always, was the Gannibals’(171). The point of focalisation here is the understandably subjective Sergei L’vovch’s, his voice merged with the impartial omniscient narrator’s.
Aleksandr Pushkin met his great-uncle in 1817, when Petr Abramovich, owner of the estate of Petrovskoe, lived just a few miles from brother Osip at Mikhailovskoe. Petr Abramovich, like his brother, kept a harem of serf girls and was notorious for his debaucheries. When Pushkin visited him again in November 1824, in the hope of obtaining family documents, including probably the German biography, Petr had just over a year left to live. Pushkin records the meeting in his diary:
Подали водку. Налив рюмку себе, велел он и мне поднести; я не поморщился - и тем, казалось, чрезвычайно одолжил старого арапа. Через четверть часа он опять попросил водки и повторил это раз 5 или 6 до обеда(VII, 238).
Tynianov uses both of these features – debauchery and alcoholism – as key characteristics in his portrayal of Nadezhda’s father, Osip Gannibal, described from the start as ‘thoroughly irresponsible’(18), if not a complete villain. It is Tynianov’s achievement, however, actually to arouse our sympathies for this egotistical rogue. His illegal second marriage had
landed him in trouble and his mistress, Ustin’ia Tolstaia had ruined not only him and his brother, but the entire family. Whatever his sins, Tynianov argues, avarice was not amongst them:
Мотовство его было удивительное, он был враг денег и точно все время летел вниз по откосу, не имея времени остановиться (Ibid).
Tynianov, as usual, enjoys the paradoxical nature of Osip’s predicament: although perceived to be a scoundrel by his estranged wife, he had actually been the victim of his own trust in a woman to whose charms he had succumbed. Tynianov portrays not Osip, but Ustin’ia as the real villain:
Старая прелестница то съезжалась с Осипом Абрамовичем, то уезжала от него и в обоих случаях требовала денег (19).
Even before the reader encounters Osip, Tynianov manages to humanize him, wastrel, lecher and absentee father that he is. Nadezhda, staring at her uncle, is reminded of her father, whom the narrator informs us she has seen only twice in her childhood: glass buttons on the waistcoat, a moist kiss and his ‘astonishingly light way of walking’(43). The child’s-eye-view adopted here by the author – the tiny physical details that a child would typically remember – is a remarkable example of Tynianov’s cinematic method of thinking and presentation, aimed at engaging his reader’s attention and sympathy – he knows exactly where and on what level to ‘place the camera’ in order to achieve the desired effect.
Sergei L’vovich, picturing a conventionalised scene as if borrowed from a sentimentalist novel, imagines that, when he meets old Osip, he will forgive him on behalf of his wife and will be greeted with remorse, hugs and tears, a scene of family reconciliation in which he, Sergei L’vovich, will be the leading actor. Instead of this, the old negro remains firmly in control, emanating a profound indifference towards his son-in-law. By this stage of his life the he has become a shadow of his former self: an indifferent handshake, a mechanical inquiry about Sergei L’vovich’s health, and ‘a long pale smile’(48) – three simple but telling details create the portrait with the perfect economy representative of Tynianov’s technique.
Characteristically for Tynianov’s method, the external details of his character’s world represent the inner landscape of the man who inhabits it. The bench is rotten and ‘blackened by rains’(48), the paths littered with yellow leaves, the arbour crooked, the ploughed fields ‘overgrown with charlock’, a scene of melancholy and autumnal desolation, reflecting the interior unhappiness of a man who is fast approaching extinction:
Он походил более на почернелое от пожара, оставленное людьми строение, чем на человека’ (Ibid).
The use of landscape to embody human situations, characteristics and emotions is a universal literary technique, but Tynianov’s handling of it is peculiarly evocative. The various
details of neglect and decay combine to symbolize a life of listlessness, weariness and hopelessness. Topography itself is permeated with symbolic images of despair. Even the young pine-trees on the hillock, pointing to the estate, seem to point to a youthful vigour that has vanished and is unrecoverable. The very ripples on the lake are used to provide a metaphor of the youth-and-age polarity. They appeared ‘like the furrows on an old woman’s face… were washed away, and the water grew younger again’(49), making us see Osip’s private situation in a universal light: humans are just links in the eternal cycle of nature. When he points to the surrounding landscape telling Sergei L’vovich, ‘All this I leave to you’(ibid), it sounds nobly elegiac, a grand gesture – except that it is an ironically empty one. All that he is leaving the Pushkins is a legal mess and derelict estate.
Increasingly, the pathetic and grotesque elements in this little tragi-comedy take greater hold: the old negro, ‘monstrously fat’ (91), is abandoned by everyone and confined to an armchair by the window, where he slept, and where ‘for hours he would follow the flight of a fly or listen even more listlessly to the creaking of a cart behind the woods’. In synchrony with these details of despair are images of the autumnal beauty – the rains, the leaves falling and changing colour [пышное природы увяданье]. These details act as an extension and embodiment of his plight: the leaves are yellow and red, the colours of disease, the death of nature; the maples are ‘on fire’ with decay, the birches ‘waxen’, connoting corpses and invalids; the trees are ‘shedding their leaves in front of the window’ (ibid) (as Osip’s soul is about to shed its body) pre-enacting his death in front of his eyes; while even the life-giving rains, instruments and symbols of fertility, had stopped, leaving an almost unnatural sterility in the air. This seasonal symbolism is conveyed by Tynianov in a few lines of prose, demonstrating once again his haunting economy of expression.
Having learnt that he had two days left to live, Osip lies staring at his father’s portrait, into the past, into history and his line of descent. Deliberately and persistently, Tynianov continues to de-mythologize the figure of the great ancestor, saying simply that he had ‘an ill- natured face, the colour of clay’(92) (Abram was by no means distinguished, but an ignoble Everyman, made of the same stuff as the first man, Adam), and that he was wearing his full-dress General-in-Chief’s uniform ‘with the ribbon of the Order of St Anne across his shoulder’(ibid), the decoration which Nabokov notes that Abram never even received.535 Symbolically Osip orders that the portrait be removed to the attic. The past is being dismantled: history, heroism, family pride suddenly irrelevant in the face of death.
535
For further discussion see Barns, Op. cit., 22 and Teletova ‘O mnimom i podlinnom izobrazhenii A. P. Gannibala’ inLegendy i mify o Pushkine(St Petersburg, 1995), 86-103.
Like a swollen corpse he is carried for a last visit to the bath-house, where he is sweated out (like a corpse being washed) and a Bacchanalian scene ensues with all the classic ingredients – light (the master’s last command is that every candlestick in the house should be lit in the living-room), leaves from the grove strewn around the chamber, wine brought up from the cellar, naked dancing and music (the guitar acting as a Greek lyre). The mythical element is increased by the description of the superstitious belief of the neighbouring peasants that all the Gannibals are actually devils. Osip is being likened to a satyr (which, metaphorically, he was) and from a distance the brightly lit manor house becomes in the local folk-imagination a palace of pagan pleasure. The dying man is bidding farewell to a lifetime of illicit pleasure and Tynianov elevates the scene into something eccentrically rich with an unforgettably intense climax, which is one of the great triumphs of the novel. In a symbolic gesture Osip orders that the horses be fed with oats soaked in wine and set free:
Ветер ходил по комнате. Он сидел у раскрытого окна и ловил ртом ночной холод. На дворе было темно. Со звонким ржаньем, мотая головами, выбивая копытами комья земли, пронеслись мимо окон пьяные кони (94).
The combination of cinematographically synecdochal images, each one being an outer extension of an emotion are observed as if by a human eye: the fistful of air, the clutched fingers symbolically empty, the limp hand, the dangling head, the tears rolling down the face and onto the thick lower lip to the point where he swallows each one slowly. The technique achieves a peculiarly effective blend of merciless observation and intense sympathy, objective as a camera.
This is followed by the symbolic giving away of goods in preparation for death – the wine given to the serfs, etc. – and the opening of the windows to remove the last barriers between himself and the nature which is shortly to claim his body and to which he will then belong. There is inverted biblical symbolism in the image of the wind blowing into the living- room and straight into his open mouth. At the creation of Man, God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life (the original inspiration) and ‘man became a living soul’ (Genesis 2:7). Now the breath of Osip Abramovich is coming with difficulty and preparing to leave his body, which will return to the earth. The drunken stallions represent the wild untamed maleness that was the essence of the Gannibals in their prime; the ‘fiery stallion’ in particular is Osip’s soul set free, while he himself will shortly be a clod of earth under those ‘stamping hooves’, and all his former lusts and glories will be gone.
Osip’s ‘silent laughter’ may be variously interpreted: joyful, jeering, empathetic, defying his fate, even self-mocking. It is a desperate kind of glee, the cynical assessment of an entire era, and of all achievement, all power:
This last sentence makes reference to the legendary tsar inextricably linked in the reader’s mind