PUSHKIN, RUSSIAN MESSIAH

     OR THE CHARISM OF THE WORD

 

                               

 

                                 By ANTONIO PARRA

 

 

It is clear that the history of our spiritual evolution belongs to the pages of the books we have read or acquired, the guide to our mental heritage, the magic circle in which we resolve or revolve, and, perhaps, the line that we will never be able to cross without disadvantage, or without betray our spirit. I have delved into the funds of my well stocked and anarchic library, where the Russian classics occupy a place of priority. There was a spine, already limp and yellowish, with bumps and chips on the cover, which immediately brought to mind images of a retrospective background and without calculations. Dense and wizened eagerness of youth! Suddenly, I felt like a whiplash and Horacio's retrospective question: ubi sunt? What became of all that? Where is what we loved then? This disturbing Horatian question is already, in itself, a source of literary force, a source of inspiration throughout the history of world literature. Perhaps, it is written to conjure up that enigma of human existence, doomed to an inexorable end, that of death.

 Seeing his eyes, my soul has sunk into an abyss of longing. There are books, because of what Saint John said of “in principle erat verbum”, that set the milestone of the vital start, or beginning of ourselves. A title: The lady with the three cards and other stories, by Alejandro Pushkin, in translation by Félix Díez Mateo, Buenos Aires, 1952. And a date written in blue ink, already very clever, because the ink is the blood of the soul, which it has also aged, just like the owner, accusing the devastation of the passing of the years, but that brings blurred images and faces to memory. Underneath a date: June 1, 1963. Surely, it was purchased at one of the booths at the book fair held in Madrid every spring.

From the bottomless pages of this little novel, succinct, concise, full of a mysterious prose that illuminates, very pushed and embossed, like everything by Pushkin, but the reader is never aware of the author's effort, as usually happens when we are in the presence of a genius, my own past was winking at me. There is in literature an angelic purpose that is racked by the mucilaginous wing of oblivion. The laughter of the black seraph resounds in the tomb of dreams. The inane ends up imposing itself on the beautiful. The thing has no way around it. This story, taken from life, where Pushkin, in the great origin of modern writing, faces, with a vivid pen and a very fast impression of the vital elan of everything around him, reflects the inaneness of the life of a gambler. But behind all this, the idea of ​​an inexorable and invincible destiny (sudba) is hidden, which is here a woman: the queen of spades. It is the Mephistophelian story, of the pact with the devil, to which the vanity or the inexperience of human nature succumbs.

The clear message, but full of mercy, that Pushkin projects here, could be that everything is vanity, parodying Chrysostom's mataoites mataiotes: love, beauty, physical health, brilliance and decorum must be taken as a mirage. We always end up doubling the rasp. Good and evil come to an end.

I had not yet turned nineteen. Surely, it is one of the first acquisitions of my library, because the dream of my life was configured to be a writer. I knew that my existential project was linked to books, source of happiness, supreme and noose of my punishments, as it has been. The Russian author acted as master of ceremonies, and in his pages, read hastily, in long vigils over coffee and tobacco and dreams of inescapable greatness ["one day I will be able to write something like this, I will be published and recognized"] made me the tailed With him I guarded my first weapons. He would receive the grail of the literary chivalric ideal, he opened the iconostasis of an aesthetic concept in which I was delving deeper and deeper over the years. All Russian literature has made me vibrate. The Queen of Spades was the first seductive nod to the femme fatale.

 After Pushkin, there would be Gorky, whose stories would make me cry, and who I devoured while riding the subway. Or Chekhov, Dostoevsky. Andreev, Ivan Bunin. I was aware that he faced me with a difficult challenge. At the Cuatro Caminos Public Library I became engulfed in reading my beloved Russian teachers. There I made contact with literature to the highest degree. This first contact filled me with prejudices towards other authors or towards the novel of other literatures, because I think, and still think, that only the Russian has reached the ceiling from the novelistic point of view. Dostoevsky, the great diver of the human soul, who undertakes his imaginative undertakings as if they were psychic walks in the labyrinth of the human heart, is the one who does not go any further. In this way, I thought I had given my first