Pushkin’s “Journey to Arzrum”: The Poet at the Border

Abstract

“Mne nenadobno puteshestvovať. la puteshestvuiu v svoem voobrazhenii,” said Aleksandr Pushkin, not quite ingenuously, toward the end of his life. Pushkin’s chronic desire for travel had so often been frustrated or deflected that his loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s to the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia, and Odessa later came to represent, faute de mieux, the peripatetic freedom of his youth. When in 1829 Pushkin and Petr A. Viazemskii were refused permission to travel to Paris, Pushkin embarked instead on the illicit trip south that would become the basis for his literary “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” six years later. In 1836, with a rueful backward glance at the orientalist fashion that he himself had helped to launch in Russian poetry, Pushkin wrote, “Vinovat: ia by otdal vse, chto bylo pisano u nas v podrazhanie l.(ordu) Bai(ronu), za sleduiushchie nezadumchivye i ne-vostorzhennye stikhi, v kotorykh poet zastavliaet geroia svoego vosklitsať druz’iam: Druz’ia! Sestritsy! ia v Parizhe! Ia nachal zhit’, a nedyshať!” (12:93). Perhaps the exuberant first words of an unfinished drama, “Cherez nedeliu budy v Parizhe nepremenno” represent a vestige of that never-to-be-realized desire (7:251-253). In short, if the south served as an escape valve for dreams of uninhibited motion and adventure, it was also a surrogate, marking the boundaries rather than the fulfillment of that freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the theme of the seductive border crossing is central to the “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” (8:1, 463):