Wave and Stone: Essays on the Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pushkin

J. Douglas Clayton. Wave and Stone: Essays on the Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pushkin. Ottawa: Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa, 2000. ii, 164 pp. Index. $24.00, paper. Professor Clayton's contributions are too well known to require more than a few introductory comments here. His previous major studies include Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1985) and Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell'arte in Twentieth-Century Russian Theater and Drama (1994). Though he is best known as a Pushkinist (and, for that matter, an Oneginist), he is also a comparativist (Shakespeare, Goethe, Hoffmann) and an authority on theatre. To these previously published studies he brings thirty years of commitment to Pushkin studies, thorough research, close readings of texts, lucid statements of intention, and fluency in several languages. The essays range from Pushkin's early Lyceum days to the 1830s. Their subjects, indicated by their titles, are: "Pushkin and the Burlesque Tradition," "Shakespearian Imagery in Eugene Onegin," "The Epigraph of Eugene Onegin," "Plot and Fate in Eugene Onegin "Eugene Onegin and the Avoidance of Comedy," "A Feminist Reading of Eugene Onegin," "Pushkin, Faust, and the Demons," and "The Tales of Belkin and the Hoffmann Grotesque." The collection has a brief introduction and a workable index. The first article on the burlesque tradition is by far the longest and perhaps also the most detailed, all the more so in that so many hefty quotations are closely analyzed. The burlesque came to Pushkin in French, of course, and these analyses are all the more convincing thanks to Clayton's knowledge of that language. This is not an incidental value: the intent of the essay is to seek out differences of comparative influence between French and eighteenth-century Russian models with assistance from Pushkin's own comments on relevant works and in the light of the poet's own beliefs about the differences between French and Russian culture. If the essay on the burlesque has a weakness, it is its survey-like organization. This is a definite weakness of the essay on Faust and the demons, an attempt to contend with a subject far too large for an essay. The result is that the presentation tends to become a mere pursuit of "some" parallels (p. 118) and concludes with an admission that "The foregoing discussion has by no means exhausted the list of works by Pushkin in which demonic motifs occur" (p. 128). The essay is also marred by a dismaying omission, namely Diana Burgin's ingenious study of "The Queen of Spades" (in Mnemosyne, the Festschrift for Setschkareff) in which she shows that each of Germann's comments and hints is so ironically close to a terrible truth that it brings him inexorably closer to the revenge of a "satanic cabal." Where the essay on the main epigraph to Onegin is a brief hypothetical interpretation, the essay on the Belkin tales and the Hoffmann grotesque is a model of consistent, systematic argumentation. Clayton does not simply organize facts, he musters them "hup-two-three." In this essay, he states them in just this formidably systematic way: "One cannot ignore the language" in which Pushkin received Hoffmann, "One must establish the chronology of Pushkin's reading," and "It is important to establish the character of... influence" (p. 134). The essay also offers a discovery. Where others, including even the exhaustive Pushkinist J. Thomas Shaw, did not find the source of the prints of the parable of the Prodigal Son that shapes "The Stationmaster," Clayton found them right under everybody's nose in Jacques Callot's prints. To this discovery he adds an exemplary comparative analysis of visual art and literary text.. I have to argue (to the degree that space permits) with Clayton's feminist reading of Onegin. He takes on two tasks in this essay: "...the function of the traditional functional motifs surrounding the heroine, the problem of her marriage, and the nature of her sexuality" and "the psychological proclivities that motivated Pushkin's stance as a writer in Eugene Onegin" (pp. …