Some Doubts about the Identity of Pushkin's Polonophil

Some Doubts about the Identity of Pushkin's PolonophilAuthor(s): Wacɫaw LednickiSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 30, No. 74 (Dec., 1951), pp. 206-212Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4204299 .

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SOME DOUBTS ABOUT THE IDENTITY

OF PUSHKIN'S POLONOPHIL

WACLAW LEDNICKI

In the June issue of the Slavonic and East European Review (vol. XXIX, No. 73, 1951), Professor G. P. Struve published an interesting study under the title

" Who Was Pushkin's Polonophil ?

" This article is in

part connected with my essay, "

Chaadayev, Mickiewicz, Pushkin, Custine,

Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and the Philosophy of Russian History," which

appeared in the two volumes on Pushkin, edited by myself and entitled

Puszkin, 1837-1937 (Cracow, 1939). I then expressed the opinion that

Pushkin's Polonophil might have been either Chaadayev or Prince P. A.

Vyazemsky, tertium non datur. But Professor Struve has now found a

third candidate in the person of Prince P. B. Kozlovsky. I must confess

that Prince Kozlovsky never occurred to me as one who might have been

the addressee of Pushkin's poem. Kozlovsky was known for his infatua? tion with Europe and his particular attachment to Poland and its West

European "

knightly "

tradition. Professor Struve quotes a passage from

Kozlovsky's significant talks with the Marquis de Custine (as reported by Custine in his book). He emphasises the fact that Kozlovsky influenced Custine's views on Russia and that Kozlovsky's

" philosophy

"

of Russian history had much in common with Chaadayev's. Professor Struve did not mention the perhaps most salient of Kozlovsky's state? ments quoted by Custine :

" Russia, in the present age, is only four

hundred years removed from the invasion of barbarian tribes whilst fourteen centuries have elapsed since Western Europe experienced the same crisis. A civilisation older by one thousand years of course places an immeasurable distance between the customs of nations." Or another : "

The Russian nation was not formed in that brilliant school of good faith by whose instruction chivalrous Europe had so well profited that the word honour was, for a long time, synonymous with truth, and the word of honour had a sanctity which is still revered even in France, where so many things have been forgotten." Then comes the passage about the Polish

" knightly

" tradition which Professor Struve has quoted and

finally the fourth passage : "

Nowadays the Poles find themselves face to face with the Russians exactly as the Russians were once face to face with the Mongols under Batu." 1

Certainly these statements are

very close to Chaadayev's views. However, I think that Mickiewicz, whom Custine saw before going to Russia and whom he read, was a more

important introductor to Russia than was Kozlovsky. In the essay of mine which Professor Struve mentions, I showed, on some ten pages,

1 I quote from the French edition of 1844 (Brussels), Vol. I, pp. 116, 117-1S 206



DOUBTS ABOUT PUSHKIN'S POLONOPHIL 207

how close Custine's opinions on Russia were to Mickiewicz's satires and

to Chaadayev's views. On the other hand, I also showed the similarity of Mickiewicz's and Chaadayev's opinions on this subject.

Certainly Kozlovsky possessed some of the traits Pushkin described

in his poetic fragment. But it seems to me that it is easier to apply the first stanza :

You enlightened your mind with study, You saw the pure countenance of truth, And you came to love foreign nations tenderly And to hate your own with wisdom . . .

to Chaadayev than to the "tattler" Kozlovsky. As a matter of fact

the only justification in even considering Kozlovsky as the original of

the portrait in this stanza is the similarity, emphasised by Professor

Struve, between his and Chaadayev's ideas.

The weakness of Professor Struve's hypothesis lies in the factual ties

between Kozlovsky and Pushkin's poem. I do not question the dates of

the poem, as we have no knowledge of when Pushkin wrote it. In order

to be able to connect Pushkin's poem with Kozlovsky, Professor Struve is obliged to place the date of the writing of the poem at the end of 1835 or even in the first half of 1836. In principle, these years are acceptable. I, too, advanced the supposition that Pushkin's fragment may have been written in 1836, after the publication of Chaadayev's

" Philosophical

Letter," at the time that Chaadayev had become universally considered an enemy of his country. But there is one consideration connected with matters of fact which prevents me from sharing Professor Struve's

hypothesis. Professor Struve suggests that the material of the poem, its factual contents, such as the item of the toast in Lelewel's honour, was given to Pushkin by the Polonophil himself. In other words, in 1834

Kozlovsky must have attended the dinner at which Lelewel delivered his

speech, and later personally discussed his feelings about the Polish insurrection with Pushkin. And yet Professor Struve confesses: "

Whether Kozlovsky ever met Lelewel personally, we do not know." He emphasises the retrospective nature of Pushkin's poetical draft. I am almost willing to agree that the poem is retrospective : it is the past tense that is used, and the insurrection has obviously already been

defeated, for, when the Warsaw revolt was broken, the hero "

lowered

(his) head and sobbed bitterly, Like the Jew for Jerusalem." Still this is a subtle matter; it depends on one's interpretation, rather, on one's

feeling of the poem. To me it does not seem likely that the vivid descrip? tion of the Polonophil's attitude towards the Polish insurrection:

You rubbed your hands at the news of our reverses, You listened to the news with a sly laugh when the banner of our honour

was down. . . . You lowered your head and sobbed bitterly . . .

could have resulted from only a casual talk between the Polonophil and



208 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

the poet five years after the event. No, the poem must be concerned with someone Pushkin saw in action during those troubled days.

All the details mentioned above give the impression that Pushkin had personally observed the behaviour of his Polonophil, that he had been close to him at the time of the described action. (We know that Kozlov?

sky was then in Paris.) It is difficult to imagine that the attitude so

concretely portrayed could have been described by the person in question several years later. And the person would not have been likely to give such details about himself.

Hard though it is to defend Chaadayev's candidacy, I believe his

position is stronger than Kozlovsky's. Professor Struve refers to my statement that the main difficulty with Chaadayev is the fact that he

was never known as a Polonophil. Professor Struve also refers to the

famous postscript which Chaadayev added to his letter to Pushkin dated

18 September 1830, in which he congratulated Pushkin on his anti-Polish

poems. And Professor Struve considers as weak my suggestion that this

postscript was written for the sake of the censor. I myself had some

reservations, but the striking ideological contradiction between the letter

and its postscript demands some explanation. Professor Struve neglects certain other facts adduced in my study, which show that the problem of Chaadayev's attitude towards Poland was not so simple, so clearly drawn as one might wish. First, Chaadayev had connections with

Polish Masons and, in 1814, was accepted into the Masonic Lodge in

Cracow, where the first two grades were conferred on him. Second, there

is the story of Madame Panova. Madame E. D. Panova was the addressee

of Chaadayev's "

Philosophical Letter." In 1836, when she was ques? tioned by the government authorities in Moscow about her political

opinions and her religion, she replied that "

as far as the civil laws are

concerned, I am a republican, and as far as religion is concerned, I am as

obedient to the spiritual laws as all of you, sirs. When the Polish war

was in progress, I prayed to our Lord to send victory to the Poles."

When she was reprimanded and told she would have done better to pray for the Russians, Madame Panova answered : "I prayed to my Lord

for the Poles, because they fought for freedom." 2 Madame Panova had

been an old and good friend of Chaadayev's. A letter of hers to him, which has been preserved, testifies to this. Besides, as I have mentioned, it was to her that the

" Philosophical Letter

" was addressed. However,

as soon as Chaadayev heard of the answers his friend had given, he hurried

to the Chief of the Moscow Police, L. M. Tsinsky, and there, both orally and in writing, denied everything Madame Panova had said. He referred

to his various misunderstandings with her ; he affirmed that she did not

know at all that the "

Philosophical Letter "

had been addressed to her, and finally, that he had never spoken to her on the subject of her

republican opinions or her prayers for the Poles. Chaadayev obviously 2 Juemke,N.,Nikolayevskiyezhandarmyiliteratura 1826-1835gg.,izd. S. V. Bunina,

1908, pp. 448-49, quoted in my study.




felt it most necessary to present such an explanation to counteract any

suspicion on the part of the authorities that Madame Panova had evolved

her opinions under his influence.3 Chaadayev was a weak character, and this is the main reason for the various complications which must be faced

by those who wish to analyse his ideology. There is yet a third fact which I mentioned in my study and which

Professor Struve has passed over in silence: Chaadayev's long, mysterious memorandum on the Polish problem, which he pasted in Sismondi's

History of France and which has unfortunately never been published. One may presume that this memorandum was sympathetic to the Polish

cause, otherwise why should it have been hidden ? Prince D. I. Shakhov-

skoy, who discovered this document, has not, perhaps could not have,

published or described it.

Plausible though Professor Struve's idea is, it does not convince me for the foregoing reasons. I should like to add, however, some facts in favour of his conception?facts which may reconcile the vivid portrayal of the Polonophil with Kozlovsky.

Lelewel's name appeared under Pushkin's pen not only in the poetical

fragment with which we have here been concerned, but also in one of the

least attractive of Pushkin's texts. I have analysed this text in one of

the books which Professor Struve mentions in his article (Aleksander Puszkin, Cracow, 1926). I have in mind Pushkin's letter to Count

Stroganov and a note in Pushkin's diary, in both of which Lelewel plays an important r61e. Professor Struve quotes only one sentence of this letter and only in a footnote. I believe this item deserves more attention, even for the sake of Professor Struve's hypothesis. Under the date of 23 April 1834 Pushkin wrote in his Diary the following note:

" I have just received from Count Stroganov a page of the Frankfurt Journal, in which the

following article was published." (Pushkin quotes the original French text from Le Journal de Francfort, samedi 12 avril, 1834, No. 101.)

'' Saint

Petersburg, 27 February. Since the catastrophe of the Warsaw revolt the coryphaei of the Polish emigration have too often demonstrated by their words and.writings that in order to further their designs and exonerate their former conduct, they do not fear falsehood and calumny. Therefore, no one will be astonished by new proofs of their obstinate

impudence." Pushkin interrupts the quotation with the following parenthetical remark in Russian :

" The reference is to the ceremonial

meeting organised in Brussels by the Polish emigres and to the speeches delivered by Lelewel, Pulaski, Worcell and others. The meeting was

organised on the anniversary of the fourteenth of December." He resumes his French quotation :

" Having falsified in this way the history

of past centuries in order to make it speak in favour of his cause, M. Lelewel also maltreats modern history. In this he is consistent. In his own manner he relates the progressive development of the revolutionary principle in Russia. He cites one of the best Russian poets of our days in

1 Ibid., pp. 449-50; quoted in my study.




order to reveal by this example the political tendencies of Russian youth. We doubt whether A. Pushkin, in a period when his eminent talent was still in fermentation and had not yet liberated itself from its scum, com?

posed the stanzas quoted by Lelewel. But we may assume with convic? tion that he would regret the first efforts of his Muse all the more for

having given an enemy of his country the opportunity of assuming in him some correspondence of ideas and intentions. As for Pushkin's

opinion of the Polish rebellion, it has been declared in his poem To the Calumniators of Russia, which he published at that time. And since M. Lelewel seems to evince some interest in the fate of this poet, confined to the distant borderlands of the empire, our natural humanity prompts us to inform him of the presence of Pushkin in Petersburg and to note that he is often seen at the court, where he is treated with kindness and benevolence by his sovereign . . ." 4

Upon receiving this provocative and unpleasant clipping, unpleasant from every point of view, from Count Stroganov, Pushkin had an impulse to react. But he did not react at all in the manner in which civic courage and the feeling of responsibility should have directed him, particularly as he very well knew that the banquet at which Lelewel delivered his speech was connected with the Decembrist Insurrection, with which he had been in solidarity at the time of its explosion. It is possible to object that an outburst of sympathy from Pushkin would have been foolhardy, as even without any other compromising actions this article could have caused him much trouble. In addition, this incident occurred in 1834 when Pushkin had changed his opinions and now sincerely condemned the Decembrist Insurrection. However, he could simply have corrected some inexactitudes in Lelewel's speech (I do not know whether it was known to Pushkin, as from the text cited by him from the Frankfurt Journal

4 Dnevnik Pushkina (i833-1835), pod red. Modzalevskogo, Moscow, 1923, pp. 13-14.

As the commentator of the Moscow edition of the Diary, Prof. M. Speransky states (ci.Dnevnik A. S.Pushkina, Trudy Gos. Rumyants. Muzeya, Moscow, 1923, vol. I, pp. 399-400) : " Pushkin precisely enough copied from Le Journal de Francfort . . . the beginning and the end of the article, that is the passages which were most concerned with him personally, whereas he omitted the middle, consisting of an historical excursion into the Russian and Polish past and particularly directed against Lelewel and against the Polish emigration in general. The author of the article accuses Lelewel of a tendentious deformation of historical facts, of the desire d' assujetir Vhistoire a ses idees, and therefore he constantly elucidates and comments on these facts, considering it necessary to inform European public opinion of the actual state of affairs. After giving in brief the history of the Insurrection of the Four? teenth of December, the anniversary of which was the pretext for the demonstration of the Polish emigres, the author of the article gives a general outline of Russian- Polish relations, on this occasion accusing Poland of aggressive intentions towards the Russian nation and ends with a characterisation of the structure of Poland before the partitions." Speransky then quotes the parts of the article omitted by Pushkin, and in these sections the author of the article explains that the partitions of Poland brought freedom to the Polish people who for centuries had been under the tyrannical yoke of the Polish nobility. In addition, Speransky suggests that the author was a certain Bekhteyev, who obviously wrote under the dictation of the Russian government. (For details see Speransky's edition of Pushkin's Diary and my Aleksander Puszkin, op. cit., pp. 184-85.)




it is difficult to conclude to what extent the article exhausted Lelewel's

speech) or simply have remained silent about the whole affair. Actually this is what Pushkin finally did. His first impulse was to write an answer, and this spontaneous gesture is extremely characteristic.

Several days after the receipt of the clipping he wrote to Count

Stroganov : " Monsieur le Comte, I am sadly expiating the chimeras of

my youth. Lelewel's embrace appears harsher to me than exile to Siberia. I thank you, however, for kindly sending me the article in

question. It will serve me as a sermon . . ." 5

Pushkin was not quite correctly informed about the essentials of the Polish manifestation in Brussels. Lelewel delivered his speech on

25 January 1834. It was published under the following title : "

Speech delivered in Brussels on 25 January 1834, on the anniversary of the over? throw of Nicholas from the Polish throne and also in memory of the Russian Revolution of 1825 and the executed Russian patriots."

6 In this speech Lelewel erroneously attributed to Pushkin the authorship of several "tales." One of these was a well-known Russian product of French origin?the result of an adaptation of Segur's fables.7 Pushkin was not aware of all these details, his information was fragmentary and based

only on the clipping mentioned previously. We have seen what his spontaneous reaction was. Actually, there was

no need to write in such violent terms, as he knew Stroganov well and was even related to him. Still he considered Lelewel's

" embrace harsher than

exile to Siberia." He certainly did not suppose that he was seriously threatened by Siberia. But the praise of a Polish enemy appeared so offensive to him that he thought of the Decembrists, chained to their wheelbarrows in the Nerchinsk mines, and considered their fate more

supportable than his own. I think it would be difficult to justify Pushkin's attitude in this case, although some Polish scholars have been

obliged to do so under their present conditions of work in Poland.8 In

my opinion, this is indeed one of the least attractive pages in Pushkin's

biography. This story might be used for the support of Professor Struve's hypo?

thesis, as it shows the vehement, even ferocious, feelings of Pushkin towards Lelewel. If Professor Struve is right, then one may easily imagine how Pushkin reacted to Kozlovsky's revelations about his

participation in the Brussels dinner. This might explain and justify the emotional tension of his poetical fragment. But we do not know that

5 A. Pushkin, Sochineniya, Perepiska, op. cit., vol. III, p. 96. 6 Polska i rzecy jej, rozpatrywane przez Joachima Lelewela, Poznan, 1864, vol. XX,

p. 188. These details have been disclosed by N. Lerner (see Istoricheskiy vestnik, 1904, vol. VIII, pp. 621-23) and by B. L. Modzalevsky (see Dnevnik Pushkina, pp. 152-53). 7 Modzalevsky, Dnevnik Pushkina, pp. 152-53 ; also Pushkin i yego sovremenniki, op. cit., vol. V, pp. 110-15. 8 See Marian Jakobiec,

" Slowacki w kr?gu poetyckim Puszkina," an offprint from Zeszyty Wroclawske, Nos. 1-2 (third year-book).




Kozlovsky took part in the Polish manifestation of 1834?this is only a

conjecture on Professor Struve's part. Professor Struve says in his article :

" Whether Kozlovsky ever met

Lelewel personally we do not know . . . But it is not necessary to pre? sume such a meeting in order to imagine Kozlovsky drinking a toast to Lelewel in Paris, in the salon of one of the parliamentary

' windbags'

(to use Pushkin's expression), or in London, or in Brussels." 9 In his Russian book on Prince Kozlovsky, Professor Struve makes a similar statement with this addition :

" There is no need to presume, following

W. Lednicki, that the addressee of Pushkin's unfinished message provoca? tively toasted Lelewel in Moscow." 10

I should like to answer Professor Struve with the following quotation from Pushkin (article on Radishchev written in 1833-1834) :

" Nowadays

there is no public opinion in Moscow ; nowadays to the calamities or the

glory of the fatherland there is no response in this heart of Russia. It was so pitiful to listen to the comments of Muscovite society at the time of the last Polish revolt. It was repulsive to see the indifferent reader of French newspapers smiling at the news of our defeats . . ." u

9 Op. cit., p. 452. 10 See G. Struve, Russkiy yevropeyets, San Francisco, 1950, p. 115. 11 Puteshestviye it Moskvy v Peterburg (fragment). See A. S. Pushkin, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, Ak. Nauk SSSR, Moscow-Leningrad, 1949, V, 7, p. 635.



Documents

Some Doubts about the Identity of Pushkin's Polonophil