Pushkin and Merimee

A Letter to the Editor of the TLS:

Sir, -Reviewing Antony Wood's translation of Pushkin's The Gypsies and Other Narrative Poems (June 30), Rachel Polonsky affirms that "The Gypsies", with its free-loving Zemphira and her death at the hands of Aleko, is a "direct source for Prosper Merimee's and Georges Bizet's Carmen". Merimee knew George Borrow's The Zincali (1841), which includes a laudatory reference to Pushkin's poem; he might have read a French translation that appeared in Le Temps in 1833. To see it as a direct source for his Spanish tale has tempted several critics.
However, the origins of Carmen go back to encounters and anecdotes that Merimee described in his Lettres d'Espagne of 1830, and a real event that (according to a letter to her) the comtesse de Montijo (then the comtesse de Teba) had told him of in 1830, in which the prostitute heroine killed by her lover was not yet a Gypsy (he claimed that he made her a Gypsy only because "j'etudie les bohemiens depuis quelque temps"). Behind the narrative of possessive lover and independent mistress lie also Abbe Prevost's Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut.Carmen first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1845.
Merimee did not then know Russian (he started learning the language in 1848); later, in a new edition of Carmen in 1852, he included in the volume, together with two other previously published stories of his own, three of his translations from Pushkin, including "The Gypsies". But "free" Gypsies are everywhere in Romantic literature, including in Merimee's own Chronique du regne de Charles IX (1829).
Perhaps more important than the question of dates and precisely when Merimee could have known Pushkin's poem are crucial differences between the two works:
Carmen is the embodiment of desire and caprice, but bound by the "loi des Cales"; Don Jose a representative of order and discipline, albeit impulsive, unstable, inclined to violence; they are two individuals, and the value of the natural and primitive, present in both, simultaneously fascinating and dangerous, remains, as always in Merimee, highly ambiguous.
In Pushkin, Aleko's passion and jealousy spring from the impossibility of any return by a Romantic "exile from civilization" (as Polonsky aptly terms him) to the primitive paradise and the natural order represented by the Gypsies.
PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley, Southampton.