DON JUAN
AND DON ALEJANDRO: THE SEDUCTIONS OF ART IN PUSHKIN'S STONE GUEST
The study of the beautiful
is a duel, in which the
artist
cries out in terror before being defeated.
Baudelaire,
"Le Confiteor
de l'artiste"
Don't
you think it's a miracle that I'm standing
here,
thinking hundreds of different thoughts at
the
same time, making my body do whatever
I
want it to? See, I can clap my hands,
raise my
arms,
lift up my eyes to Heaven, lower my head,
move
my feet, turn left, right, forwards, backwards,
spin
round . . . (He falls over).
Molière,
Dom Juan, 3.1
IN HIS CLASSIC INQUIRY into Alexander Pushkin's poetic mythology, Roman Jakobson explores Pushkin's fascination with monuments, figurines, and idols. I would like to use Pushkin's play Stone Guest to consider the figure regularly facing the statue within Pushkin's plots: a poet. This pairing of poets and statues is a natural one, for, as I hope to show, the fixity of every statue is neatly complemented by what is for Pushkin the inherent mobility of the creative individual. In its anti-poeticality, the statue in Stone Guest proves to be more ambiguous than the instrument of justice critics, including Jakobson, have perceived it to be. At the same time, the play's hero departs from the long and venerable tradition of the Don Juans who went before him, yet in a way that illuminates rather than merely displaces them. With help from a contemporaneous story fragment of Pushkin's we will see that in the collision of Don Juan and the Stone Guest Pushkin offers us his meditation on the deep and abiding links between seduction, fiction, and truth . . .
At bottom, Stone Guest
embodies the disaster not of poetry's failure, but of its total triumph. If [Pushkin's fragment] "The Guests" was all
about the fate of passion and imagination in a world grown prosaic and mundane
to the point of death, Stone Guest is
a thought experiment about the opposite extreme. In Don Juan's homeland, poetry is still very much in
fashion: artists are adored, passion is
prized, words still mean something.
This is a world-to use the psychological topography "The Guests" employs-of
excitable "southern" natures, a world where esprit
moves people. Instead of phlegmatic Russians
who sit sneering at anything that smacks of vitality, Pushkin gives us the
Spain of yore. Like all images of
otherness-Pushkin never visited Europe-it tells us much about the elided self,
for Pushkin's fantasy cannot help admiring a world where poetry is at
home. Moreover, his hero, at a time
when poetry seems to be dying possesses the poet's wildest dream: an almost
infinite gift, the improviser's power of ceaseless poetic mobility, a verbal
source that never dries up, never requires labor, delights every audience,
always works its magic.
But the story Pushkin ultimately tells here is the tragedy
of poetry, its death in the line of duty.
Pushkin finds the flaw in this perfect scenario, the better, it may be,
to reconcile himself to cold northern natures, an aristocratic audience with
flagging passions, and the writing of prose, which sticks ever so slightly in
his throat. Perhaps, suggests Stone Guest, the poetic nature is more
at home in Don Juan's Madrid than in Vol'skaia's Petersburg, but the poet's
battle against inertia should nonetheless be considered a universal scenario,
in which the poet cannot hope to conquer-conquering is for commanders-but only
to live and create as much as possible before the inevitable final curtain.