On one level this death is punitive and inevitable, of course—these are tragedies—but the ‘crime’ being punished in each case is exceedingly complex. There is strength as well as craven hopelessness in it. In each little tragedy, poetry or creativity opposes itself to death in a different way, and the possibility of transcendence is differently linked with humane or redemptive service within a larger community.

Recall what Pushkin had written in his draft review of Pogodin’s play earlier that same year, 1830. Laughter, pity, terror, and constant astonishment were essential to all drama. Didacticism was fatal. Tragedy must not preach, it must show; an honest showing forth obliges the playwright to be as ‘impartial as Fate’. For a poet like Pushkin, impartiality could be resolved structurally, in the realm of proportion. Bulk or intricacy of explanation is not necessary to it. But balance is always necessary, and each of the first three tragedies is a neoclassically sculpted confrontation that, in the words of one critic, portrays the peak moment or ‘fifth act’ of a crisis situation that then ‘moves swiftly and inexorably to its catastrophic climax’.12 The crisis breaks, but resolution does not occur. The final stage direction of Feast in Time of Plague—’The Master of Revels remains, lost in thought’—is as ambivalent as ‘The people are silent’ at the end of Boris Godunov. Pushkin’s closing strategy is to suspend the question rather than answer it. We are left with the two halves of one maximally stressed, but integrated, creative self.

The plot of The Miserly Knight was closest to the poet’s own biography. Its tensions so closely resembled those between Pushkin and his own frivolous, profligate, tight-fisted parent that the poet presented the piece as his rendering of scenes from an eighteenth-century English ‘tragicomedy’, The Covetous Knight by Chenstone (William Shenstone), even though no such play exists. Albert, the neglected son, is honourable, impulsive, generous, and poor. His father the Baron is a miser of astonishing scope who is determined to protect his coffers of gold from the appetites of his heir. In the final scene, mediated by a congenial and impartial Duke (representing the rights of youth to spend and the duty of wealth to purchase spiritual as well as material goods), the slandered Albert challenges his father to a duel. This sacrilege is interrupted only by the Baron’s sudden heart attack and death.

This grim sequence is so melodramatic that it is easy to miss the oxymoron in the title. A true knight cannot be miserly (he can covet, but miserliness is something else). Pushkin understood coveting and to some degree respected it. All strong appetites naturally covet. Pushkin was an extravagant, even a compulsive desirer and spender: of money, energy, women, travel on the road, time in society. So was his father. The difference between Pushkin and his profligate father was that the son, alone in his family, could also create wealth. (Pushkin could stake and gamble away a stack of lyric poems at the card tables because he was capable of more than merely ‘winning them back’: he could write new ones.) The problem with hoarding—and with the Baron’s fantasies—is not the industry involved in accumulating wealth; the Baron, heartless and sadistic as he is, has a point when he remarks that getting rich was hard, ascetic work, and let his ‘wretched heir’ first ‘earn the wealth he craves’ before he squanders it. The problem with hoarding is its dishonourableness as an economy. Contrary to the claims in his famous monologue, the Baron is not made more secure, serene, powerful, or creative through his chests of gold. Called before the Duke, he reveals himself to be a timid and lying courtier, so much so that according to one critic, The Miserly Knight does not qualify as a tragedy at all, but as a satire.13 After all, greed on stage had been conventionally resolved in a comic fashion. But for Pushkin, comedy alone could not do justice to this theme. He came to admire Shakespeare’s moneylender Shylock over Molière’s Miser precisely because Shylock displays a complex rather than a simple vice.14 As a man on the brink of marriage into an impecunious family, and then as the father of four children within six years, Pushkin would feel acutely his duty to provide. He had a rigorous, aristocratic sense of honour.