“With no great quantity of paintings”: Pushkin’s Polemic with Raphael in “Madona”

Abstract

One of only three sonnets Pushkin wrote in his lifetime, (1830) is a monument to union of a poet's life and work. (1) Due in large part to circumstances of Pushkin's death, reception of sonnet has focused less on poem itself and more on his wife's famous epithet. Although Pushkin's marriage is important from a creative standpoint, extent to which Natal'ia Goncharova's presence has saturated interpretations of his poems to her should be reexamined. The stoic quality attributed to Goncharova most notably in (1830) became fertile ground for scholars and writers interested in Pushkin's mythologizing of his wife. (2) This concentration on Goncharova--thought to be core of sonnet--appears to have stifled greater interest in poem beyond Pushkin's ekphrasis of painting that inspired comparison. A deeper investigation into rarity of sonnet form in Pushkin's oeuvre, as well as rhetorical stance imbedded in his tone and word choice, shows a more complex side to Madona. Whatever details of their married life, association Pushkin drew between image and his bride-to-be does not exhaust or exclude other interpretations of sonnet. Just by taking poem's title as our point of departure, it seems emphasis should first be placed not on Pushkin's wife, but on culturally-loaded associations word had in Romantic period. The purveyor of Romantic fascination with Raphael's Madonnas was Vasily Zhukovsky, whose essay Rafaeleva Madonna (Raphael's Madonna) had itself arisen after a close reading of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-loving Friar), written in 1797. (3) Before Pushkin wrote in 1830, he had already made poetic reference to Madonnas by Raphael with an eye to Zhukovsky's presentation of artist in his essay. In poems Kto znaet krai, gde nebo bleshchet ... (Who knows land, where sky shines ...) and Ee glaza (Her Eyes), both from 1828, one finds a foregrounding of Raphaers Madonnas and conventional praise for rare talent of their creator in vein of Zhukovsky, albeit with some irony. Compared to poet's rejection of the paintings of old masters (kartiny starinnykh masterov) in two years later, two poems from 1828 betray traditional Romantic reception of Raphael, although Kto znaet krai ... initiates a playful critique of painter's dedication to image. The penultimate line of sonnet, however, is an emphatic claim not only over Goncharova, but over image itself: tebia, moia Madona (literally you, my lady; my emphasis)--an image connected to earlier poems, but also to certain literary and cultural trends of nineteenth century. Apart from a cursory reference in Polkovodets (1835), a poem that shares reverent tone of in its opening lines, Pushkin did not refer to image again. Pushkin may have written about other incarnations of Mary, (4) but term Madonna, prior to sonnet, frequently corresponded to a painting by Raphael. The image ceased to be just a painting once it had been associated with his wife--what had once been a ubiquitous symbol of culture and Raphael's entrenched position in Romantic view of artist was transfigured by Pushkin's pen into a human being. Like his brief experimentation with sonnet, Pushkin retired image once he had taken it to limits of creative expression. Perhaps this general tendency towards constant experimentation and innovation is source of Pushkin's suggestion in Kto znaet krai ... that Raphael choose other subjects to endow with his genius. A poet with Pushkin's range provides an interesting contrast to an artist known for painting same woman over and over again. The language and tone of further reinforces change in Pushkin's attitude toward image. …