The Captain's Daughter

The Captain's Daughter, according to the back cover of Pushkin's Novels, Tales, Journeys, 'has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature'. There will be time to wonder whether there are grades of perfection elsewhere. Not having read the whole of Russian literature, I couldn't say but it's a big claim up against Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev et al. James Joyce told his daughter, Lucia, that Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need? was 'the greatest story that the literature of the world knows' without saying it was perfect. 

Pyotr gets lucky more than once on his adventures before marrying Marya. The story is like an extended parable from the Bible with sharply delineated good and bad characters, virtue rewarded, the bad punished and thus a happy ending. For me, at least, a bit more ambiguity raising a few more questions might be required for anything to be 'great'. Hamlet is more convincing as a character because we can't be sure if he's a hero beleaguered by difficult circumstances or an indolent student mooching about.

Pushkin's characters often end up in duels, as does Hamlet, and as did Pushkin himself, which can't help but be dramatic but life was lived in primary colours in olden days. I don't hold that against him but in many ways a picture painted from a more subdued or limited palette can offer more subtlety. Coming at the beginning of Russian literature, it's remarkable how cultures like that find themselves such a major figure to follow, like Homer in Greek, Chaucer in English and maybe Dante in Italian. 

There's plenty more to be had in Novels, Tales, Journeys but the biography by T. J. Binyon, much lauded by A. N. Wilson - a fine biographer himself- arrived today so I'll soon be as well informed about early C19th Russia as I once was about the Soviet Union, courtesy of Solzhenitsyn. It might work to read the biography and stop off to read the fiction as and when it is mentioned. My trouble is that I'm not really a leisurely reader. Once I've started a book I like to finish it, as long as it's worthwhile.

--

Also upcoming, The Bonfire Party by Sean O'Brien, then Departures, said to be the 'schwanengesang' of Julian Barnes who I'm missing already and, later, Maggie O'Farrell.