SIMON KARLINSKY

Bestužev-Marlinskij’s Journey to Revel’ and Puškin

Aleksandr Bestužev (1797-1837) acquired his literary reputation as a romantic critic and fiction writer during the years 1822-25 when, jointly with Kondratij Ryleev, he edited the annual miscellany Poljarnaja zvezda (North Star). A participant in the Decembrist rebellion, he was exiled first to Siberia, then to the Caucasus. National fame as the foremost Russian romantic novelist came to Bestužev during those years in exile, when he signed his work with the pen name A. Marlinskij (after a pavilion called Marly in Peterhof where he once lived). During the 1830s and early 1840s, multi-volume collections of his stories, novels, and essays appeared in numerous printings (Muratova 1962: 162). He was the first Russian writer whose work was widely translated into foreign languages (Vengerov 1892 III: 176-77). Then, by circa 1850, the murderous reviews by Vissarion Belinskij of 1840, 1842, and 1847 (Muratova 1962: 165) gradually turned the general admiration into contempt for what came to be termed “Marlinism.” Semen Vengerov was the only commentator of the late nineteenth century to assert that the Belinskij-derived view of Bestužev-Marlinskij as the epitome of everything false, verbose, and stilted was neither fair nor true (Vengerov 1892: 148-49).

Belinskij’s curse was lifted from Bestužev’s name only after the 1930s, when the Decembrists were admitted into the revolutionary pantheon of the USSR. Unpublished in his country since 1847, Bestužev’s fiction made a comeback in 1937 (Bestužev-Marlinskij 1937). The year 1948 saw the appearance of his collected poetry in the Biblioteka poèta series (with a second edition in 1961). In 1958 a two-volume collection of his novels, stories, essays, and poetry was published. None of these editions included Bestužev’s first major publication, the travelogue in prose and verse Poezdka v Revel’ (Journey to Revel’) (though the first six lines of its prefatory poem were cited by Nikolaj Mordovčenko in his introduction to the Biblioteka poèta collection of verse). The travelogue was published in February 1821 in the journal Sorevnovatel’ (Contender) (Golubov 1960: 78), and it appeared in book form in the summer of that year (the authorization to publish, signed by the censor Ivan Timkovskij and dated June 25, 1821, is reproduced on the reverse of the title page in Bestužev 1821).

Aleksandr Bestužev began his literary activities in 1818-19 as a literary critic who championed nascent Russian romanticism. His attacks on stylistic archaisms and neoclassical poetics in Pavel Katenin’s translation of Racine’s Esther and Aleksandr Šaxovskoj’s comedy Lipeckie vody (The Lipetsk Spa) created a considerable stir and made Bestužev’s name known in St. Petersburg literary circles (Vengerov 1892: 153; Golubov 1960: 55-60). At the end of 1820 Bestužev traveled from St. Petersburg to the capital city of Estonia, Tallinn, which was then called Revel’ in Russian, Reval in German and other Western languages, and had borne the name of Kolyvan’ in the earlier Russian tradition.

The journey, which lasted less than two weeks (from the end of December 1820 to January 10, 1821), was undertaken with the transparent purpose of writing a book of travel impressions. Bestužev must have read a number of history books on the Baltic region. He was particularly fascinated by the recurrent occupation of Estonia by its various neighbors—the German knights of the Livonian Order, the Swedes, the Danes, and the Russians—with the resultant mixture and conflict between the varying cultures.

Bestužev had three literary models for his travelogue, all of which are mentioned in its text. All three were highly admired representatives of that genre: A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne (1768); Lettres sur I’ltalie by Charles-Marguerite-Jean-Baptiste-Mercier Dupaty (1785), a work that was still much valued and reprinted in France during the first three decades of the nineteenth century; and Nikolaj Karamzin’s Pis’ma russkogo putešestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveler) (1791).¹ Like these predecessors, Bestužev recorded the sights and conversations of his trip and his own emotional, typically sentimentalist reactions to them. He also incorporated into his text a literary discussion he had had with his brother, in which he made it clear that the most important contemporary writers for him were Karamzin and Krylov among the older generation and Baratynskij and Puškin among the younger. (Ruslan i Ljudmila [Ruslan and Ljudmila] was published in the summer of 1820, a few months after Puskin’s departure for his southern exile in May. Baratynskij’s first poèma, Piry [Feasts], was read and discussed at the December 13, 1820, meeting of the literary society Vol’noe obščestvo ljubitelej rossijskoj slovesnosti [Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature], of which Bestužev became a member on November 15 of the same year.) (Golubov 1960: 74; Bazanov 1949: 347)

Journey to Revel’ also contained two interpolated novellas of the kind that were to bring Bestužev his later fame for his narrative prose: a contemporary society tale with mistaken identities, a duel fought to defend a woman’s honor, and a happy dénouement ending in marriage (Bestužev 1821: 5-13); and a historical tale of knightly adventure (1821: 124-41) which was the progenitor of the series of Bestužev’s cloak-and-dagger stories of 1822-25 that were set in the Baltic region and are now known as his Livonian Cycle (Leighton 1972: 258 and 1975: 70). The opening paragraph of the second novella, incidentally, is a compact summary of the reign of Boris Godunov from the death of Ivan the Terrible to the coronation of the False Dimitrij, the historical territory later to be traveled by Puškin and A. K. Tolstoj.

Unlike the sentimentalist travel accounts on which Journey to Revel’ was patterned, its text is interlarded with passages in verse. Although as a poet Bestužev must be assigned a secondary rank, the poems included in Journey to Revel’ are among his most remarkable ones, both in their own right and for their special intertextual relationships with the poetry of his predecessors and contemporaries. (Lauren G. Leighton’s two surveys of Bestužev’s poetry [1969a: 309-22 and 1975: 117-33] do not mention the poems in Journey to Revel’.)

It has long been noticed that one of the best-known lines in the whole of Russian poetry, “Beleet parus odinokij,” was borrowed by Lermontov from Bestužev’s narrative poem “Andrej, knjaz’ Perejaslavskij” (Andrej, Prince Perejaslavskij), first published in 1828 and 1830. But Lermontov was by no means the only poet to incorporate lines from Bestužev’s poetry into his own, as we shall see. For his part, Bestužev often appropriated lines, phrases, or the entire tone of a poem from other poets. To give one random example, the first line of his love lyric “Aline” (To Alina), dating from 1827 or 1828, “Ešče, ešče odno lobzan’e!” (Bestužev-Marlinskij 1961: 75), is an unconcealed, though slightly garbled, quotation from Puškin’s Cygany (The Gypsies), line 431: “Ešče odno . . . odno lobzan’e.”

In Journey to Revel’, the elegy on pages 4-5 evokes Konstantin Batjuškov’s elegy “Ten’ druga” (The Shade of a Friend; cf. Bestužev 1821 and Batjuškov 1964: 170-71). The two extended poems about the waterfall at Narva (121-22, 123) could stand comparison with the poems called “Vodopad” (The Waterfall) by Deržavin (which antedated Bestužev’s two poems), Baratynskij (1821 and thus almost contemporary with Journey to Revel’) and Jazykov (1830). Most uncanny of all in intertextual terms are the two first poems of Bestužev’s book, the prefatory one, in the form of a dedication of the book to the poet’s friends, and the poem about military maneuvers on page 3. These two poems are interesting not only because they show what Bestužev had learned from his contemporaries Puškin and Baratynskij, but also because the first one predicts the diction and the vocabulary of Evgenij Onegin (Eugene Onegin) and the second one adumbrates Poltava, two works by the mature Puškin that did not yet exist when Bestužžev’s travelogue was published. There is still another poem in Journey to Revel’, a satirical one on pages 32-33, which compares the St. Petersburg balls to an informal social gathering the narrator attended in Revel’. This poem’s intertextual ties to several passages in Eugene Onegin (1.27-28, II.25-44, VIII.14-16 and 23-26) are quite complex and would merit a separate study.

For several years now, I have amused myself by showing a xerox of the first poem in Journey to Revel’ to some of my colleagues and asking them to guess what it might be. Among the written replies from scholars particularly concerned with Puškin studies, I can cite the following descriptions of this poem: (I) “a real encyclopedia of the imagery of both Puškin and Baratynskij in the mid-1820s”; (2) “a hitherto undiscovered earlier draft of Eugene Onegin”; and (3) “a clever imitation of Puškin that uses his typical imagery, lexicon, and diction.” This Puškinian flavor of the prefatory poem was so easily grasped by the colleagues I addressed that one has to marvel as to why the poem was not included in the recent editions of Bestužev’s verse or why it was not mentioned in any of the prefaces to the publications of his other writings.

With the appearance of J. Thomas Shaw’s dictionary of Puškin’s rhymes in 1974 and his later, even more indispensable concordance to Puškin’s poetry (1985a), we now have the precise scholarly equipment with which to measure the Puškinian effect these two poems produce. Since none of the poems in Journey to Revel’ bears a title, I shall henceforth refer to the first of them (Bestužev 1821: 1-2) as the prefatory poem and to the second one (1821: 3) as the military poem. (Please see the attached texts reproduced from the 1821 edition and their English translations by the author of this essay, with the added numbering of lines.)

The prefatory poem is dated “Revel’, 29 December 1820.” It consists of thirty-four lines of irregularly rhymed iambic tetrameter. Although the rhymes never form an Onegin stanza, they freely alternate the three kinds of rhyming typical of it: quatrains of cross-rhymes and of adjacent and enclosing ones are present. Thus a pattern is produced which suggests to the reader, if only half-consciously, the sonorities of Puškin’s novel in verse. The opening quatrain of the poem reads:

The rhyme drugi-dosugi in this first quatrain immediately brings us to Puškin. True, as J. Thomas Shaw’s dictionary of rhymes (1974) demonstrates, Puškin did not get around to rhyming these words in their plural form until 1835, in a draft of a response to his friends who advised him to write a sequel to Eugene Onegin. But the singular forms, drug-dosug and drug-nedosug, were a constant feature of Puškin’s verse from as early as his 1815 poem “Gorodok” (Small Town), where these combinations are to be found at several points. As Tamara Xmel’nickaja suggested (1966: 58), when Andrej Belyj attempted a stylization in the manner of Puškin’s Eugene Onegin in certain portions of his autobiographical poèma Pervoe svidanie (First Encounter, 1921), he wrote a quatrain with the enclosing rhyme drug-dosug.

But the beginning of the prefatory poem reminds us of Puškin also because these lines show the impact of the “Posvjaščenie” (Dedication) to Ruslan and Ljudmila, which Bestužev could have read during the preceding summer. His close familiarity with this poèma is attested by the prose meditation (Bestužev 1821: 27), where the narrator is caught in a blizzard and reflects on the transience of human existence. The prose passage and the four lines of verse that end it,

follow fairly closely Ruslan’s apostrophe to the battlefield covered with remnants of dead warriors and overgrown with trava zabven’ja (III.178-91). Puškin dedicated Ruslan and Ljudmila to beautiful women, krasavicy, while Bestužev’s prefatory poem is addressed to his “demanding friends,” vzyskatel’nye drugi. The prefatory poem repeats two ideas about writing poetry from the dedication of Ruslan and Ljudmila: poetry is created during the hours of leisure (“V časy dosugov zolotyx”), and it should be playful (igrivaja). Compare lines 4 and 7 of “Dedication” with lines 4 and 15 of the prefatory poem, where Puškin’s “moj trud igrivyj” is echoed in Bestužev’s “Poèzii vsegda igrivoj.” This last epithet was also applied to poetry twice in Puškin’s verse epistle “K Batjuskovu,” published in 1815 (S:1.20.24 and S:I.20.43).²

Other Puškinian echoes in the prefatory poem are more problematic because they involve Puškin’s poems that antedate Journey to Revel’ but were not published until after Puškin’s and Bestužev’s deaths in 1837. Two of Bestužev’s biographers assume that Puškin and Bestužev must have been close friends during the period 1818-early 1820 (Vengerov 1907-15: 153; Golubov 1960: 62-63). But this supposition is nowhere attested or in any way documented. Mixail Alekseev (1930: 241-51) and Lauren G. Leighton (1983: 351-82) were right to insist that the two writers had never met in person. Their correspondence of 1822-25, when Puškin was a contributor to Bestužev’s and Ryleev’s Poljarnaja zvezda, begins with Puškin’s highly formal letter (Milostivyj gosudar’ [Gracious Sir]) in reply to a lost one by Bestužev (Puškin 1982 I: 458-59). The form of address and the tone of the letter imply that the two writers were strangers when this correspondence began. However, it is conceivable that Bestužev had access to the two poems in question in hand-written copies through Baratynskij or some other literary man that he is known to have met prior to his Revel’ journey.

Be that as it may, line 7 of the prefatory poem, “ctob ja, pitomec prazdnoj leni,” follows the pattern of line 34 from Puškin’s then-unpublished “Naezdniki” (The Riders), “Užel’ nevol’nik prazdnoj negi” (S:I.69.34). Similarly, Bestužev’s line 20, “I s krov’u rezvoju kipelo,” calls to mind a line from Puškin’s “Monax” (The Monk), “U ženixa krov’ sil’no zakipela” (S:I.2a.85). Line 19, “Kogda zvezdilosja Ai,” with its neologistic verb zvezdit’sja, is a clear allusion to Baratynskij’s Piry:

The frequent evocations by the Russian poets of Puškin’s time of the champagne brand Ay might ultimately be traced, as Nabokov has suggested, to Voltaire’s example (Nabokov 1975 II: 480). Puškin had mentioned it in his 1819 verse epistle “Vsevolozskomu” (To Vsevoložskij, pub. 1826). Ay is brought up in Puškin’s poetry a total of six times. The last time it appears is in “Otryvki iz putešestvija Onegina” (Excerpts from Onegin’s Journey). Its context, “Как zašipevsego Ai / Struja i bryzgi zolotye,” in the eulogy to the music of Rossini, seems to combine Voltaire’s écume pétillante (as cited by Nabokov) with Ay’s starry sparkle, praised by both Baratynskij and Bestužev in 1820.

So far, only the possible impact of Puškin (and to a lesser degree Baratynskij) on Bestužev’s opening poem has been examined. What about the reverse influence—the impact of the first two poems in Journey to Revel’ on Puškin? Although Puškin spoke of a few of Bestužev’s novellas and essays in his correspondence, the travelogue and its highly Puškinian first poem are nowhere brought up (Bogoslovskij 1934: 620). Yet he must have kept it in his mind for many years, consciously or not, because its rhymes, rhythms, intonations, and whole lines keep reverberating through the pages of the mature Puškin of Eugene Onegin and Poltava.

The remarkably long breath of the prefatory poem encompasses one continuous sentence in its initial sixteen lines. The syntactic structure of this sentence is built on the enumeration of the things the poet had promised his friends to write—ja obeščal of the first line. This enumeration is reinforced by the anaphoric reiteration of Čtob ja, which begins lines 3, 7, and 11 and which may have been in the back of Puškin’s mind when he composed the even more anaphoric fourteen-line listing of Mazepa’s vices in Canto One of Poltava, where more than half of the lines begin with Ctoor with Čto on . . . :

and so on for eight more lines (Poltava 1.228-42). A similarly anaphoric series of lines beginning with čto is found in Eugene Onegin, VIII.11. In the dedicatory poem of Eugene Onegin we find that the lines “Poezii živoj i jasnoj” and “Prostonarodnyx, ideal’nyx” recall lines 11 and 15 of Bestužev’s dedication: “Poèzii, vsegda igrivoj” and “čtob ja bylova [sic] s ideal’nym.” Both texts qualify their authors’ manner of writing poetry by the adjective nebrežnyj (“Ruka nebrežnaja pisala” in Bestužev and “Nebreznyj plod moix zabav” in Puškin). Neither Batjuškov nor Baratynskij, Bestužev’s other possible models, connected the adjectives igrivyj or nebrežnyj with their creative endeavors (Shaw 1975a, 1975b).

Line 25 of the prefatory poem, “Skvoz’ nabljudatel’nyj lornet,” must be the progenitor of a series of similar lines in Eugene Onegin: “Razočarovannyj lornet” (I.19.11), “I nevnimatel’nyj lornet” (VII.51.11), and, in “Otryvki iz putešestvija Onegina,” the line closest of all to Bestužev, “A razyskatel’nyj lornet.” The first of these lornet lines repeats Bestužev’s rhyme for it, svet. In his fine commentary on Eugene Onegin, Ju. M. Lotman devoted a whole page to explaining the significance of the lorgnette in Puškin’s time. Lotman cited several eighteenth-century works as the probable source of these lines (Lotman 1983: 151-52).

Lines 27-30 of Bestužev’s prefatory poem form a quatrain that features a typical Puškinian device: a group of dots that replace an unprintable word. The number of dots (eight) and the context point to at least three Russian adjectives, all of them translatable into English as “shitty.” But it is the next quatrain, lines 31 and 34, that seems a veritable hatchery for future Puškin lines and intonations:

Although there is a four-foot iambic line in Ruslan and Ljudmila that ends with the words moj rasskaz (VI.361), the first line of Bestužev’s last quatrain seems closer to the final line of the prologue to Mednyj vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman), “Pečalen budet moj rasskaz.” The second line of this quatrain, “Bez piitičeskix prikras,” consisting as it does of the negative Bez, followed by a five-syllable adjective and a two-syllable noun in genitive plural which the adjective modifies, may have served as a model for some of the most expressive lines in Eugene Onegin. In VI.44 we find “Užel’ i vprjam i v samom dele / Bez èlegičeskix zatej / Vesna moix promčalas’ dnej,” and in VIII.14, at the description of Onegin’s first glimpse of Tat’jana as a married society woman, there is a sequence of four lines (7-10), all anaphorically beginning with Bez, which culminates with “Bez podražatel’nyx zatej,” echoing both Bestužev and the cited line from VI.44.

The Puškinian significance of line 33, “Ruka nebrežnaja pisala,” has already been mentioned. The final line of the prefatory poem explodes with Puškinian associations that fly in all directions. Its first half, “I tak druz’ja,” also forms the beginning of the last line of the False Dimitrij in Scene 11 of Boris Godunov, “Itak, druz’ja, do zavtra, do svidan’ja.” (Line 21 of Bestužev’s prefatory poem, “Teper’ sovsem drugoe delo,” would later be echoed in Mnišek’s rhymed speech at the end of Boris Godunov’s Scene 12, “Teper’ ne to, ne to čto prežde bylo.”) The second half of line 34, which Bestužev emphasized by spacing out its letters (razrjadka), was apparently the point of departure for all four instances when PuŠkin used the word načnem that are recorded in Professor Shaw’s concordance: “Nacnem ab ovo” of the unfinished “Ezerskij” (1832-33) and the shorter poem related to it, “Rodoslovnaja moego geroja” (Genealogy of My Hero, 1836); the beginning of the narration proper that follows the initial digression on versification in Domik v Kolomne (Little House in Kolomna), “Teper’ nacnem.”—”žila-byla vdova”; and the poignant moment in Eugene Onegin when the two male protagonists are about to start shooting at each other: “čto ž, načinat’?”—”Načnem, pozaluj” (Shaw 1985a II: 609).

The prefatory poem from Journey to Revel’ so clearly presages the diction of Eugene Onegin that even the magičeskij kristall of Onegin’s penultimate stanza, through which the poet dimly distinguishes the contours of his future novel, seems to be foreshadowed by Bestužev’s lines 11—14:

Therefore, it is curious to note that when Chapter I of Onegin was published in February 1825, Bestužev thought it insignificant and unworthy of Puškin. His oft-quoted letter to Puškin of March 9, 1825, with its invidious comparison of Puškin’s description of St. Petersburg to that of Byron in Don Juan and Puškin’s able defense of his magnum opus in his reply of March 24 (Puškin 1982: 471-78), indicates that neither writer was aware of any connection between Onegin and Bestužev’s poem written five years earlier. (On Bestužev’s view of Onegin, see Leighton 1969a: 200-201 and 1983: 351-52.).

Bestužev’s military poem, which follows the prefatory one after sixteen lines of prose, does not have the Puškinian rhythm or sonority. A somewhat sloppily versified fifteen lines that mix iambic tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter and have no regular rhyming pattern, the poem seems far from Puškin’s habitual craftsmanship and precision. And yet, its lexicon, its rhymes, and some phrases somehow found their way into Puškin’s later work. The poem’s very first word, the inchoative Byvalo, has become almost a Puškin trademark. There is one example of it in a Puškin poem that antedates Journey to Revel’, the epigram “Na Rjabuškina” (On Rjabuškin, pub. 1815). But this initial position of Byvalo is especially frequent in the mature Puškin of Poltava (two instances), Domik v Kolomne (also two), and, significantly, Eugene Onegin, where six stanzas, mostly in the later chapters, begin with this word.³ In the fifteenth stanza of “Otryvki iz putešestvija Onegina,” “Byvalo, puška zorevaja” is an amalgam of the first two lines of Bestužev’s military poem: “Byvalo tam, kogda Priroda v sne, / Gremela puška zarevaja.” (Bestužev misspelled the word zorevaja;puška zorevaja, according to Slovar’ jazyka Puškina 1957 II: 159, was a cannon shot that announced the reveille, zórja.) To quote Xmel’nickaja once more on Andrej Belyj’s stylistic disguise as Puškin in portions of his Pervoe svidanie, “At times, the very choice of words takes us back to the lexical coloration of the poetry of Puškin’s time” (Xmel’nickaja 1966: 58). As an example of what she means, Xmel’nickaja cites two lines from Belyj’s poem: “Byvalo, ja zvonilsja zdes’ / Otdat’sja piršesvennym negam

The rhyme of line 3 of the military poem, na kone, is common enough in Puškin, whether in amphibrachic lines (as in “Černaja šal’ ” [The Black Shawl] and “Pesn’ o veščem Olege” [Song of the Prophetic Oleg]) or in iambic ones. Yet, of the fourteen instances cited in the dictionary of rhymes (Shaw 1974), not a single one repeats Bestužev’s rhyming it with sne. But the line that follows, “Skakal, oružiem sverkaja,” has several memorable associations with Puškin, including Onegin, “vzorami sverkaja” from Tat’jana’s dream (V.18.12), and “Stal’noj ščetinoju sverkaja” from the 1831 poem “Klevetnikam Rossii” (To the Slanderers of Russia; S:III.190.41). This line of Bestužev’s has somehow found its way into a popular Russian song with words and music by V. A. Sabinin, first published in Kiev in 1915 and frequently heard in Russian émigré restaurants during the period between the two world wars (Černov 1949 I: 145; Ivanov 1969 II: 216-17):

In line 5 of the military poem, the intertextual relationship is reversed, because that line is a paraphrase of a line from Puškin’s early poem “Vospominanija v Carskom Sele” (Recollections in Carskoe Selo, pub. 1815). Compare Puškin’s “Za stroem stroj tečet [...]” (S:1.24.99) with Bestužev’s “I vdrug stekalsja k stroju stroj.” There are also two comparable wordings in Ruslan and Ljudmila, “Tam rubitsja so stroem stroj” and “I s voplem stroj na stroj valitsja” (VI.260 and VI.302). But in the lines that follow, 6-9:

we find ourselves again in future Puškin poems.

Bestužev’s rather archaic “Perun [ . . . ] boevoj” was repeated by Puškin in a strange, fragmentary poem about the confrontation between Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon. Written in 1824 but couched in an eighteenthcentury odic manner, the poem begins with the words “Nedviznyj straž dremal.” In its line 51, the gaze of Napoleon is described as “Kak boevoj perun, kak molnija sverkal” (S:11.209.51). This line of Puškin’s thus combines lines 4 and 6 of Bestužev’s poem. The other three lines cited above generated some of the imagery and vocabulary of the description of a battle in Canto Three of Poltava. “Pexota dvigalas’ stenami” is recognizable in “Volnujas’ konnica letit; / Pexota dvižetsja za neju” ( Poltava III.164-65). “Smykalis’ latnikov polki” reappears in Poltava as “Polki rjady svoi somknuli” (III.158). Four lines at various points in Poltava end with the word polki, and two of these lines rhyme this word, as Bestužev did, with kazaki (Bestužev spelled it kozaki). The whole contour of two of Puškin’s lines in Poltava, “Ne pogibali kazaki” (1.189) and “Koj-gde garcujut kazaki” (III.193), follows that of Bestužev’s “I naletali kazaki.”

The remaining lines of the military poem (lines 10-15) might offer a few more, somewhat less certain examples of Bestužev-to-Puškin intertextuality. Line 11, “Ulanov približalsja roj,” has the shape and sonority, though certainly not the visual impact, of Puškin’s “Prelestnic obnažennyj roj” in Baxčisarajskij fontan (Baxčisaraj Fountain) (87). “I luč dennicy zolotoj” (line 12) offers a particularly intriguing instance of who-got-itfrom-whom. Puškin has the line “V časy dennicy zolotoj” in his lengthy verse epistle “Poslanie k Judinu” (Epistle to Judin), written in 1815, but not published in his lifetime. If we assume that Puškin read Journey to Revel’ at the time of its first publication in February 1821,⁴ then the combination luc dennicy could come from Bestužev. We meet it in Puškin in a serious context in the elegy “Grob junosi” (The Grave of a Youth), written a month or two after the publication of Bestužev’s travelogue. The wording in the elegy is “Naprasno bleščet luc dennicy.”

The most familiar instance of this phrase is, of course, in Lenskij’s elegy in Chapter VI of Eugene Onegin, later made universally popular through Petr Čajkovskij’s heartstring-tugging setting of these words in Lenskij’s aria of his best-known opera, where he turned Puškin’s parody into a war horse for sweet-voiced tenors.

Neither Vladimir Nabokov (1975 III: 24-31) nor Jurij Lotman (1983: 296-300), both of whom made a thorough search in their respective commentaries for every possible foreign and Russian source for Lenskij’s cliche-ridden elegy, had anything to say about earlier precedents for luč dennicy. Could it be possible that all those tenors have for over a century been singing a phrase ultimately traceable to Aleksandr Bestužev-Marlinskij, of whom none of them surely had ever heard?

The answer is, unfortunately, no, because Bestužev’s “luč dennicy zolotoj” is a verbatim quotation from Batjuškov’s 1810 adaptation of Evariste Parny’s poem “Le Revenant.” Called “Prividenie” (The Apparition) in Russian, this is a poem which Puškin is known to have particularly admired (Batjuškov 1964: 119-20, 282). Batjuškov’s and Bestužev’s wordings are practically identical. Puškin must have read “Prividenie” when the two-volume edition of Batjuškov’s verse and prose appeared in 1817 (Puškin’s marginal notes to its second volume are usually included in academic editions of his collected writings, and they are assumed to date from ca. 1830). Chapter VI of Onegin was written in 1826. The reminiscence of Batjuškov’s line, cited by Bestužev in 1821, was most likely unconscious when Puškin placed these words in Lenskij’s elegy. Let’s just say that when those tenors project the by-now hackneyed words “Blestnet zautra luč dennicy,” they are citing three well-known Russian poets: Konstantin Batjuškov, Aleksandr Bestužev-Marlinskij, and Vladimir Lenskij. Simultaneously.

It has long been known that great poets may borrow plots, style, or particular turns of phrase from their lesser contemporaries. This applies to Puškin as much as to anyone. Commentators have pointed out his borrowings from a wide array of foreign and Russian sources. There have even been special studies of Puškin’s so-called plagiarisms (Geršenzon 1926: 114-22; Gippius 1930: 37-46). In an earlier work I tried to show the importance for Puškin of the neoclassical verse comedies by Russian playwrights of the early nineteenth century, especially Nikolaj Xmel’nickij (Karlinsky 1985: 312-37).

In 1935, Sergej Bondi (1935 VII: 652) demonstrated the dependence of Puškin’s Sceny iz rycarskix vremen (Scenes from Knightly Times), dating presumably from as late as 1835, on the Bestužev-Marlinskij novella “Revel’skij turnir” (Tournament at Revel’) (based, in part, on the interpolated novella about knights in Journey to Revel’). As this essay has sought to show, there is an even more important debt that Puškin owes to Bestužev: the earliest formulation of the style and diction of Puškin’s own mature poetic manner, to be sounded later with much greater significance and perfection in Eugene Onegin and Poltava.