The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Romanticisms 121

mayor shouts at the audience. “You’re laughing at yourselves!” This Gogol line of pretenders will inspire buffoons, rogues, madmen, and nihilists of a severity and hilarity undreamt of by Turgenev’s pure-minded Bazarov.

Pushkin fully appreciated Gogol’s gift and nourished it. When in 1834 Gogol wrote to the poet asking for a real Russian anecdote to work up into a comedy, Pushkin obliged with one about mistaken identity based on his own experience: the poet loved being on the road and was once taken for a government official himself. But Pushkin’s worldview was tethered to the aristocratic honor codes of his time. Remarkably, his criteria for honor remain stable regardless of the time and place: a military adventurer in 1604 or an illiterate Cossack rebel in 1774. Inhis historicaldrama, Pushkin presents Dmitry as false, but asuseful and enabling to others. Only once, when he tries to be “true” in his confession of love to the Polish princess Maryna Mniszech, does his confidence falter. Pugachov too acts confidently, at times even magnanimously. Pushkin’s pretenders have nothing to gain by running away and there is, in any event, nowhere for them to go; their stories are over.

For the two novels, The Captain’s Daughter and Dead Souls, our point of departure is precisely this question of running away. Taking on an identity, for Pushkin, entailed responsibility, because his plots tend to circle around and come home. Pushkin’s heroes might perform poetic improvisations, but they do not burst out to safety beyond the frame of the story, which is Gogol’s favored route. In Pushkin, getting away with pretense does create weight, and this qualifies the pretender, during his brief sojourn on stage or in history, to be taken seriously, treated eye to eye as an equal, as someone who understands honor and deserves it. In one of his face-to-face encounters with Grinyov, Pugachov explains the morality he lives by in terms of an ancient Kalmyk tale. It is better, the pretender says, to live thirty-three years on fresh blood like the eagle than three hundred years on carrion like the raven. To which Grinyov responds: “Clever. But in my opinion, to live by murder and plunder is the same as pecking carrion.” Both men fall silent. Not only does each live by his own truth, which is beyond the other’s judgment, but only by speaking one’s truth can a life be saved – one’s own, or another’s.

In Chapter 8,Pugachovdemandsthat GrinyovrecognizehimasTsar PeterIII. “Judge for yourself,” Grinyov responds. “You’re a sharp-witted person: you’d be the first to realize that I was faking . . . I swore allegiance to her Majesty the Empress; I cannot serve you.”26 Pugachov is impressed by this sincerity (by this willingness to ignore hierarchy and address him eye to eye) and sets Grinyov free. A similar exchange occurs in Chapter 12. Pugachov has just liberated Masha Mironova from the clutches of the villain and traitor Shvabrin.