Puschkins Hase.

Rollberg, Peter

Andrej Bitow. Puschkins Hase. Rosemarie Tietze, tr. Frankfurt a.M. Insel. 1999. 195 pages. DM 38. ISBN 3-458-16958-X.

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, Russia's Pushkin bicentennial celebrations have been regularly in the news, at times making international headlines simply because of the gigantic scope of the festivities. Derided by some foreign observers as compensatory self-indulgence -- for there is little else to celebrate in today's Russia -- the massive worshiping of a poet still looks touchingly old-fashioned even in some of its more absurd manifestations. After all, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) was and will remain Russia's primordial poet, creator of the nation's literary language and its consensus-approved self-image; it just so happens that the condition of this nation is a sad one at the moment.

Among those skeptical toward the state-organized Pushkin cult, or any cult for that matter, is Andrei Bitov (b. 1937), whose distinguished writing career has been associated with Pushkin for a long time. Could the reason for his immunity to literary pomp and kitsch be the fact that he was born in the year when Stalin's Soviet Union celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's death with comparable noise? Whatever the cause, in his prose works devoted to Pushkin, Bitov, a prominent liberal of the so-called 1960s generation (shestidesiatniki), emphasizes the esthetic aspects rather than the political, and does so in a consciously postmodernist manner. Puschkins Hase (Pushkin's Hare) too is a playful attempt to free Pushkin of the uncomfortable sugar coating under which he had been stored and bring us closer to the enigmatic side of a man whose complexity transcends mediocre comprehension. Yet Bitov's fictional Pushkin never acquires real vibrancy either, since the author predominantly muses about abstract subjects.

Bitov's imagination is undramatic, theoretical, and rarely sensual, as is his usage of language. To keep his narrative minimally flowing, he renders it subversive through ambiguity and multiple asides, which keep the reader in a state of uncertainty about the direction and meaning of it all. But despite the topical dryness and stylistic lightness on the text's surface, at its core is Bitov's deep faith in any great poet's ability to "see the future." This peculiar faith permeates his puzzling narrative throughout and naturally connects Bitov, our contemporary, with the classical Russian concept of "the poet as prophet," implying that it is precisely the prophetic gift that enabled Pushkin and others to touch their contemporaries' souls.

As a counterweight to this heavy philosophical basis, Bitov, who consistently questions the validity of the "real" world but remains an enthusiastic believer in the myriad of literature's galaxies, chose an insignificant anecdote as his personal entry to the Pushkin universe: in mid-December of 1825, the poet was traveling from his exile estate of Mikhailovskoe to St. Petersburg when suddenly a hare jumped onto the road, forcing the superstitious coachman to stop and the even more superstitious Pushkin to order the carriage turned back home. This event supposedly took place on the eve of the Decembrist upheaval, which later brought some of Pushkin's friends to the gallows. In other words, had it not been for the hare's intervention, Russia's greatest poet might have been drawn into the anticzarist mutiny and paid for it with his life. Contingency or higher will? Bitov, half tongue-in-cheek, proposes to erect a monument to that patriotic animal which virtually saved Pushkin and secured Russia's ascendance to national cultural identity by granting the poet another twelve years of life and creativity.

To Bitov, the paradoxical, anecdotal Pushkin seems to act as a powerful antidote against the dead, inapproachable monument erected by officialdom. Perhaps equally subversive is Bitov's deliberately erratic narration, full of insider jokes with a certain dose of silliness and constant meandering between the genres of speculative essay and imaginative fiction. Often enough, though, Bitov's speculations are stunningly astute, even in the book's second piece, a science-fiction story set in 2099 (that is, in the year of the tricentennial of Pushkin's birth), when a "chrononaut" is assigned to travel back in time and take a photograph of the poet. Of course, there is quite a dose of narcissism in Bitov's Pushkin games, and maybe a quest for literary self-assurance as well. But that weakness -- and the aforementioned dryness -- is charmingly compensated by the writer's irony, whose targets include his very own self (one could justifiably call Bitov an ironic metaphysician).

The publication of Puschkins Hase in Germany in late 1999 was obviously intended as an act of deference during the poet's bicentennial, but any such book customarily faces the problem of transplanting a narrative from Russia's Pushkin-saturated intellectual environs to a culture in which the poet never became a household name (unlike, say, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky) and where most allusions are lost on the rank-and-file reader. In the present edition, the detailed endnotes supplied by a literary scholar may help to a certain extent, but then there is another danger, similar to explaining a joke to someone who didn't get it. At least the book's lovely vignettes by Reso Gabriadse, stylized in the manner in which Pushkin himself adorned the margins of his manuscripts, lend it some pleasurable authenticity.

Peter Rollberg George Washington University