It has been far too long since I’ve reread Pushkin’s little-read short story. Bring an undertaker’s son myself, it seems natural that I say a few words about Pushkin’s story and its meaning, both in the Russian context of the post-Petrine era as well as that peculiar business as well.

The story is a mere ten pages, but make several profound points. The story, in its Petrine Russian context, concerns, yet again, a confrontation between Old Russia and Petrine, or modern, Russia. It presents a confrontation that, as is so often the case, expresses an ambiguity to modernity that has typified my own literary criticism, an ambiguity towards the Old Russia of the Slavophiles, towards Orthodoxy and the old war of life.

Peter’s Russia is an easy target. From the Orthodox point of view, the 18th century was a disaster for Russia. Peter did his best to vitiate Russian tradition, bringing the church under his personal thumb, and violating the Orthodox canons by demanding that he and he alone be in charge of church appointments. Peter was a pagan in that he decorated his new buildings with the statues of the old Roman pantheon. Peter was Mason, having been initiated into the Lodge while in the ultra-liberal city of Amsterdam. Peter increased the power that landlords had over serfs. Peter made his illiterate serf lover, Catherine, into “Empress Catherine I,” an illegitimate Tsarina by nearly any standards. There was not a legitimate Tsar again until Paul, as Peter III was also a Mason. Peter massively increased taxation, bringing many nobles and peasants to ruin. He murdered his own son, Alexis. Peter’s crimes parallel the bolsheviks.

Regardless, apologists of Peter will claim, a claim not without merit, that Peter’s reforms were necessary to make Russia capable of doing battle with her many external enemies, such as Sweden, who, at the time, was, technologically speaking, ahead of Russia. Peter built the Russian navy that was to eventually destroy Sweden’s pretensions to global power. Without Peter, it was and is said, it was only a matter of time before the old system was defeated militarily by more technologically oriented neighbors.

This confrontation, as I have said many times before, was the central core of Russian politics from Peter to today, October of 2007. This schism was at the root of Russian literature and philosophical debate from Peter’s defeat of his half-sister Sophia. This ambiguity between Petrinism and Tradition has been, to say the least, minimized by Russia scholars.

Russia became a more diversified country, for better of worse. Foreigners were imported in large numbers to take state and military posts. The merchant class grew, as did foreign trade and urbanization. The army grew tremendously, as did the state budget and bureaucracy. The nobility was welded into a more or less cohesive class, to be based more on merit than on family connections. Peter declared war on Russian tradition.

What does this have to do with our short story? The funeral business was always a strange one. Not merely because it dealt with corpses, but it dealt with them for money and profit. Undertakers had always been a misunderstood group, considered to be universally morbid–though my personal experience suggests the opposite–and seemed to elicit the eternal fear of death from those who came in contact with them, a concept often underrated by those dealing with death. Death takes on a whole new meaning in Pushkin, however.

The funeral business, even today, is one of the last professions to remain within families. It is not as if many voluntarily enter such a profession, but is almost the last “apprentice-based” business. It remains also the last specifically ethnic business, in that the ethnic traditions of a people seem to be magnified during times of death than at any other time, except possible at weddings. Today, even these vestiges of tradition have disappeared. Irish wakes, a phenomenon with which I am intimately familiar, are now alcohol-free affairs–a heresy if I ever heard one. Older Italian women are starting to wear other colors than black to wakes, and ritual wailing is a long forgotten relic. Only a handful of ethnic wakes today have an overt religious aspect. This very fact proves the near complete secularization of the decadent west, a secularization the elites have forced in people to their own peril.

But it is precisely in this decay of ethnic funeral customs that is at the root of Pushkin’s story. The plot is simple enough. The undertaker is named Adrian, a highly symbolic name in Russia, as it is the name of the last Russian patriarch, who died in 1700, after which Peter I refused to appoint a successor and eventually abolished the office, radically overstepping the traditional bounds of his office in doing so. Russia was changed radically from this moment forward, and such a move typified Peter and his successors until the revolution. Adrian is not a bad man at all, and nothing about his person suggests any specific desire for profit over anything else. He is a businessman however, and seems to do rather well given the context of the time. He is presented as a middle class fellow, declasse in the Russian context, and possibly of merchant stock. He is moving into a new town, leaving a peasant-style house into a more middle class one, a move Adrian deplores, which is suggestive in itself. He seems to be taking on added expenses to match is income and status, something unheard of prior to Peter.

Adrian is typical of many in his day, the post-Petrine era, one in which Russian specialists, whether or not they know it, are still struggling with. A funeral heightens the ethnic and religious ideas of a people, and it is where such ideas are magnified. There is nothing like the sight of gravestones or copses to get an otherwise secular American thinking about God and death. The two often go together. But Adrian, like his patriarchal namesake, lives in two worlds: the world of the wealthy merchant, a life given impetus by peter, and one as an interloper, one who invades the sphere of religion and tradition, perverting it into a “business.”

In his new environment, he meets his neighbors, who, as usual seem a little fascinated with the new arrival in respect of his profession. He invites his new neighbors to dinner, all of whom are merchants, where they begin making toast after toast, and, finally, a toast to their customers. When they get around to their host, the jokes begin, for they begin drinking to his customers, who they interpret to be the corpses, rather than the families of the corpses.

All undertakers are aware of the jokes. They are often harmless, and it seems to me, almost entirely derive from the permanent fear of death that haunts humanity, and serve as the moral basis of the Orthodox faith. If jokes lighten that fear, there is rarely a problem, except in this case. Adrien takes this very personally, and makes a crack that he will invite, in the future, only his “Orthodox corpses” to dinner parties in the future. He angrily dismisses what the reader might interpret as jokes about what they fear death. For in reality, Adrian’s customers are not corposes, but their families, who make the arrangements and pay the bill. This twist on the idea of customer must have a basis, and that basis is the fear of death. But he very fact that Adrian consciously refers to the religion of the corpses is more telling and powerful, and is at the hinge of this short story. The corpses are Old Russia: dead, but still remembered, and they still have the power to strike fear into the “new classes” of post-Petrine Russian society, then and now.

As one might expect, upon returning from making funeral arrangements over the wealthy wife of a merchant, he enters his new home to find the undead corpses of his former “customers” surrounding him. They speak respectfully to him, but the spectacle frightens Adrian to such an extent that he runs screaming from the house. He awakes in his bed, only to be told that he has passed out from the drinking party: there was not dead merchant’s wife, and certainly no corpses.

Old Russia is presented as out of time and space, like an extremely vivid dream. But like the Devil in “Ivan’s Nightmare,” this is far too vivid to be a dream or hallucination. Dreams are rarely so vivid, where rather conversation and a strong sense of place prevail. Hallucinations are still more removed from these firm senses. Hence, Pushkin is leaving another ambiguity to the reader. It was not a dream or a hallucination, but a vision, an apparition of Old Russia that, in its own way, reminds Adrian of his name. The corpses are depicted as being dressed in uniforms reminiscent of Old Russia, and they, albeit respectfully, condemn his business practices, or even more superficially, the fact that he has commodified one of the most magnetic aspects of tradition, that of the burial of the dead.

Now, as far as short stories go, this one is rather cut and dry, but, as in all Russian literature, Russian history is necessary to make sense out of it all. Firstly, the easier interpretation is that the undertaker is being confronted with Old Russia. In his case, an undertaker is replacing the older traditions of funeral service, where the elderly ladies of the village would dress the body and make it presentable for viewing. The family home, rather than the “parlor” was the scene of the wake, and, in this transition, much of cultural value was lost. It remains true even in this benighted and administered age that funeral customs remain one of the most profound markers of ethnic and religious identity.

Secondly, it refers to the inability of Russian intellectuals to come to terms with Peter. Whether in the poetic ideas of the Slavophiles or the vulgarity of Belinskii, a true synthesis of medieval Russia was never reached in the sense that it might be a part of Russian life. St. Nicholas II attempted to create such as synthesis, but the Rasputin debacle made it into a joke. Whether or not Stolypin’s ideas of independent peasant landowners might have brought Russia to a distributivist and royalist future is conjecture, though some of the literature seems to think so, thus forcing the “revolutionaries” to push their timetable forward.

Thirdly, and likely the most profound, is that the ghosts were accusing the undertaker, in a way, of taking a sacred function, that of burying the dead, and turned it into merely another profit-making venture. The burial of the dead, from Antigone onwards, is one of the central motifs of western culture, regardless of culture or religion. It is a sacred duty, accompanies by rites and traditions that speak loudly to the community at large about life and the afterlife. To turn this into a profit making industry is perverse, and leads one to a Creon like end, that of madness and alienation.