I loved you is a reversible text

Pushkin’s Invention of "Reversible  text".  Case Study:  “I Loved You”
Марина Сапир

Keyword: Pushkin, "I loved you", lyrics, ambiguity, textual analysis, "Eugene Onegin"

The paper introduces a concept of reversible text:  a literary text with two types of implied readers and two incompatible interpretations, such  that each interpretation is available for only one type of readers. The concept is illustrated by the example of Pushkin's poem "I loved you". I characterize two types of implied readers, show  the two opposite interpretations of the poem, and the literary devices which make the text reversible.


Introduction

I want to start with a large quote from B. Gasparov's text "Pushkin and Romanticism" [1]. He compares the ironic ambiguity of a romantic poem  with the type of ambiguity  one can find in Puskin's works:

"Ambiguity of Pushkin’s discourse is of a different kind. It is exclusionary rather than inclusive. Pushkin's works do not play “hide-and-go-seek" with the reader; they simply do not bother to offer a reader any clue to what he is supposed to seek, and what he may eventually find. One cannot detect on the immaculately clean and clear surface of Pushkin’s text any indication that its message may imply something that goes far beyond, and possibly in the direction opposite to what looks as its self-evident meaning."


I plan to illustrate this thesis  in the example of Pushkin's most famous poem, "I loved you" (ILY).  It is almost universally  understood as a story of “unrequited  love”:  a lyrical confession of a speaker to the  woman who rejected him. Everything seems to be clear in these beautiful verses. But when semioticians [2,3,4]  tried to  justify the interpretation by analysis of the text, they encountered anomalies which  "may imply something that goes far beyond, and possibly in the direction opposite to what looks as its self-evident meaning."  Still neither of them rejected the popular interpretation,  A. Zhlochevsky, S. Senderovich  attempted to  update it. In my view, the attempts were not successful: somewhat muddy new interpretations still did not reconcile all contradiction and are devoid of touching simplicity of the "self-evident meaning".

So there still is no answer why, despite the anomalies,  the poem is perceived as it is.  The  textual  anomalies, noticed  by the semioticians, are not detected  by the majority of readers on the  "immaculately clean and clear surface of Pushkin’s text", exactly as B. Gasparov stated in the quote above. And we do not even know where these anomalies would lead us, if we pursue them.

V. Nepomniashy [5] is the only one, as far as I know, who  admitted the ambiguity of the poem, while not rejecting the popular interpretation outright:

"We will never be able to decide what prevails, what is expressed here: contained jealousy or self-sacrifice, acceptance or resentment, bitterness of undervalued – and, therefore -  fading love or a concealed flame, "I loved" or "I love" . "

V. Nepomniashy assumes that there should be some reconciliation, a single meaning, which includes both "acceptance" and "resentment."

But, perhaps,   opposite meanings are not intended to be reconciled? For example, B.  Gasparov in the same work [1] talks about some "hermetic circles", where a reader needs to belong to perceive a "hidden"  meaning of Pushkin's text:

"No amount of literary sensitivity or general knowledge on the part of the reader would allow him to penetrate into this world of implied paradoxes and hidden, often acutely sarcastic shifts of meaning, unless he carries a membership card of a certain hermetic circle for which, and for which only, those paradoxes were supposed to make sense."


In other words, Pushkin creates his poems in such a way that the meaning you perceive depends on the "circle" where you belong.  It would imply that no reconciliation between the meanings is possible by design.

I intend to demonstrate that this is the case for ILY, and  the  poem has two intended interpretations, "two sides",  such that a reader's character and worldview determines the interpretation he sees.   I call this type of text "reversible" after  a reversible coat:
-  both "sides" of the poem  have "patterns", images,
-  which "side" you see depends on  your point of view, the "circle", where you belong. 
-  Looking at any of the patterns you have no clue about the existence of the other side.   

B. Gasparov states   that this specific type of ambiguity of  Puskin's works can not be associated   with romanticism, pre-romanticism, or realism. It puts Pushkin outside of all these movements. Most likely, Pushkin invented this device.

In the first section, I give definitions of reversible text and describe expected properties of  some of Pushkin's reversible texts, as well as the procedure for identifying such a text. 

In the second section, I show two sets of poetic devices leading to two meanings in ILY for two different "hermetic circles".

1. Definitions
1.1. Reversible text

I will give a general definition first, as the idea of "reversible text" is applicable not only for Pushkin's poetry, even if Pushkin invented it. The concept of specific Pushkin's reversible text is defined later based on Pushkin's own classification of his readers.
 
First, I want to fix the general terminology.  It is assumed that each literary text is associated by the author with a particular type(types) of implied readers.  An author envisions an implied reader  with the particular type of perception reading the poem and arriving  at its interpretation. For any reader, an interpretation of the poem is  all that the poem means to him.   Generally, an interpretation can be summarized in such a way as to communicate it to others.

Definition: Reversible text  is a literary text which satisfies four conditions:
-- It is designed not for one, but  two types of implied readers.
-- Each implied reader  is expected to understand the text, to arrive at some  interpretation of it.
-- If an Interpretation is  satisfactory for an implied reader of one type, it  will not be satisfactory for an implied reader of another type.

For completeness, we can add that any reversible text allows a Super- reader:   the one who can see the trick of reversibility, understand  both incompatible interpretations and how they are created.  There is always at least one Super-reader: the author of the text. But there may be others.  For example, here I plan to show two opposite interpretations of ILY, announcing    myself as a Super-reader for this poem.  A Super-reader is not an implied  reader of a reversible text, by the definition: those are not supposed to see both meanings.

Using ambiguity in a literary text is nothing new. Reversible text  as a device is different from other devices which rely on ambiguity, double meanings, such as  irony, satire, allegory, subtext. Those devices require a reader to grasp two ideas at once to understand the intended meaning of the text. The reversible text,  by contrast, is designed so that each implied reader  can NOT find both meanings.

I can expect an objection that the existence of reversible texts contradicts a general  assumption about a textual integrity of a significant literary text. Indeed,  having two irreconcilable interpretations seems to warrant this concern. However,  one may say that the text built as reversible would have "double" integrity:  each implied  reader does not see a possibility of opposite interpretation, and has no reason to doubt the integrity of the text.

Let us notice that such a device as reversible text is particularly useful in Russia, where it plays a role of trojan horse.   In cases of censorship, for example, this may help to smuggle in forbidden ideas, hiding them from censors.  In a case of a strong domineering mass culture, a dissident poet may want to pacify mass readers, making the text look traditional on  the first glance, while it is delivering the author's  ideas  to a sympathetic reader. Those adversarial circumstances were always major Pushkin's concerns.

In the future articles, I plan to show that, before and in parallel to creating ILY,  Pushkin used the same device in "Eugene Onegin":  his greatest masterpiece is a reversible text, having two different fabulas, sets of characters  and two meanings in two interpretations, intended for two types of readers.  Then  I plan to  demonstrate that the device turned out  to be useful for Chekhov — and he employed it too for the same purposes.

1.2. Pushkin's reversible texts

A reversible text requires for its functioning  two types of implied  readers with  distinct views and tastes. To model, understand  the design of Pushkin's reversible text we need to figure out the  types of implied readers  Puskin envisioned. Fortunately, Alexander Sergeevich himself  defined  two types of people, distinct by their mode of perception.

Namely, Pushkin wrote in "Eugene Onegin"  (Chapter 4, stanza L1):

Hundred times blessed is the one who is devoted to his faith,
Who lulled his cold mind
And rests in his heart's joy
As a drunk traveler on an overnight  stay,
Or, more tender, as a butterfly on a spring flower;
But woe to one who  can foresee all
Who does not feel giddy
Who hates the translation
Of every word, every move
Whose experience has cooled  his heart
And forbade him to be carried away.

The two modes of perception are different  by the role of  "cold mind" in understanding of the world: a person who  "lulled his cold mind"  into a dream state will  perceive much nicer world (until he has to  wake up) than a person with his mind fully awake, who does not allow himself to  be carried away. Most people would belong to one or another group, and it is impossible to belong to both.

We may expect these two modes of perceptions to concern not only reality, but artistic texts as well.
Accordingly, we can expect to see  that Pushkin has in  mind two types of implied  readers:  the  "butterfly on the flower" type reader  can be also called a "credulous"; the type of reader who does not "get carried away"  may be called "incredulous".

Most likely, a credulous  reader in Pushkin's time was a fan of sentimental novels.  An incredulous reader  would look at this sentimental sensibilities skeptically.

 Pushkin was classically educated in the Lyceum, where he studied Aristotle rhetoric.  He could use it to develop different appeals to these readers. In terms of rhetoric,  the credulous readers could be  persuaded by "pathos": an  appeal which involves arousing emotion, such as pity, fear, or anger. It draws on the audience's specific values and beliefs (a credulous reader "is devoted to his faith") to make a message more compelling and relatable. The incredulous readers would not be persuaded by the same pathos appeal directed at credulous readers. Instead, they  are persuaded by "logos": an appeal which relies on logic and reason to make a convincing argument.

Of course, Aristotle assumed that every person can be  influenced both by pathos and by logos, even though he recommended tailoring a proper mixture of pathos, logos and ethos appeals for each audience. Pushkin had to go further.

Pushkin's worldview would be rejected by  the readers who blissfully "lulled their mind" and were not perceptive to logos.  Instead of trying to persuade them, he figured out how to make the text acceptable for them, while delivering  his hidden message to a sympathetic audience at the same time. He did it by using two types of appeals to deliver two different messages.

We may say that in the quoted stanza Pushkin justified looking at his texts as potentially reversible, designed with two opposite messages for two types of readers.  Based on this helpful explanation  from A.S. Pushkin, one may apply the next Reversibility rule to test reversibility of a Pushkin's text:

(1) Find in the text  the devices which act to evoke emotions, appeal to the beliefs of   a credulous  reader, while leaving an incredulous reader indifferent.
(2)  Find   anomalies in  the text which make the text ambiguous for an incredulous reader but could not be noticed without  conscious intellectual efforts.
If the search on any step fails,  the text may  not be reversible. If both steps are successful,  the first meaning can be derived based on the results of the step (1) and the second meaning shall be based on the results of the step (2). If the interpretations contradict each other, the text is reversible.

I want to stress that the rule is inferred  from Pushkin's own description of two modes of perceptions in the stanza I cited.  It is important to notice that, judging by the same  stanza  (Ch4, LI) Pushkin himself  identifies with the incredulous group, who do not get "carried away".  He derisively compares a credulous reader  with  "a drunk traveler on an overnight  stay".   It means, the interpretations are not equally valuable: the interpretation intended for an incredulous reader is closer to Pushkin's  views. 

2. Case Study: “I loved you.”

I start with my literal translation:

I loved you:  the love, still, possibly, 
In my soul is extinguished not quite;
But  let it no longer disturb you;
I  do not want to sadden you at all.
I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,
Languishing with timidity, with jealousy.
I loved you so tenderly, so sincerely,
God help you to find   some other love like this. 



2.1 The popular  meaning

Here I describe popular understanding of the poem among regular Russian readers and researchers.
The poem is  understood literally as Pushkin's own sincere  confession of love to a  woman he knew, as a direct  address to this woman.  It is customary  for a commentator  to express regret that an addressee of the poem is unknown. Here are some quotes:
“‘I loved you’ is one of Pushkin’s most beloved poems. These simple eight lines teach self-sacrifice, for there is no place for egotism and disrespect in love.”
“The final lines show the nobility of the hero: he wishes his beloved woman to be happy with another man, even though he still loves her.”

This understanding is exported abroad, and is accepted universally. For instance, the authors  [6] are interested in literary devices in this text that create “the illusion of simplicity,” while at the same time express “the deepest emotions to which lovers are able.”
In short, the only commonly accepted interpretation of “I loved you”  is a sweet expression of eternal, selfless love by A.S. Pushkin to some of his acquaintances. This is the interpretation R. Jakobson [2], for example,  accepted before any analysis  and never rejected.

2.2. Application of the Reversibility Rule. Step 1
Here I demonstrate how the reversibility rule is applied to the ILY to find the two interpretations and to make a conclusion about its reversibility.  The process consists of two steps.
On the first step  we need to "Find in the text  the devices which act to evoke emotions, appeal to the beliefs of   a credulous  reader".

The first such device is an accumulation (accumulation is a literary device that involves gathering related words, phrases, or ideas to build intensity and emphasize a point). The poem accumulates a large  semantic  cluster  of words and expressions related with the concept of  "love",  love-cluster.

The love-cluster:
-- to love, love (five times in eight lines, the verb's tense is not relevant here)
-- wordlessly, hopelessly
-- languishing
-- timidity
-- jealousy
-- so tender
-- so sincerely
-- you find   some other love

For a credulous reader, each of the units in the love-cluster points to    an image of sentimental love, acting subconsciously  as  a strong positive emotional stimuli. 
The incredulous  readers are not supposed to be charmed  by the idea of sentimental love.  Maybe, they are affected by the image of selfless love to a lesser degree, particularly if they do not believe in such a thing. 

The second poetic device of this sort is the phonetics of the poem. With all the repetitions of sounds, internal rhythms, parallel syntax constructions and so on (I will not go here in the details of the original Russian sound of the poem)  the poem is perceived  like an ancient spell, like a mantra, like a lullaby. This increases the subconscious emotional effect of the poem on a credulous reader, further helps to "lull" his mind.

The third poetic device of this sort is the absence  of metaphors or visual images in the text.  This "simplicity"  further appeals to  a credulous reader, increasing  the emotional effect of the semantic love-cluster. A credulous  reader feels like the speaker speaks artlessly,  directly, from  his heart.  The device  does not make a difference for the incredulous reader, who does not care much about the semantic love-cluster.

Absence of visual images does not mean that the poem  does not have poetic images,   as  R. Jakobson[2]  and S. Senderovich [4]  claim. In general sense, an artistic image in a poem is a mental image which the author, through literary devices, evokes in the reader to prompt an emotional response.

In ILY,  Pushkin creates an image of sentimental self-sacrificial love.  The image is not visual,  rather it is a mental image of a concept, idea.   The image is created with the love -cluster cues, specifically designed to evoke such an image and strong feelings in sentimental credulous  readers. The poem is as minimalist as any text-based conceptual work. It would make Pushkin's poem a prototype of "conceptual art", if it was not a reversible text at the same time.
There is no doubt for a credulous reader that the poem is lyrical, direct, sincere expression of A.S. Pushkin's true love to an unknown (to the reader, known to  Pushkin) woman.


2.3 Application of reversibility rule, step 2


This step requires  to discover anomalies of the text first.  I call the narrator in the poem "the  hero". The woman here is called "addressee".
Here is the list of the anomalies.

(1)  Love in the past tense.  The expression "I loved you" is an anomaly in Russian, where "real love" (настоящая любовь) means eternal love. The expression "I loved you"  has two opposite meanings: love in the past and uncertain feeling currently.     One thing is certain: the hero  speaks not about "real" love, but about some other love, which can fade away.
(2) Quantifiers of uncertainty: there are three such quantifiers in the second sentence: "still", "possibly",  "not quite".  All of them  quantify the chance of existence,  and the degree of expiration  of the hero's love. This should be perceived as an anomaly not only in the Russian language, but in Romanticism and  Sentimentalism as well: these movements did not view love as something transient. It looks like the hero dangles his love in front of his addressee, threatening  that it will be  extinguished completely soon.
(3) Advice to calm down. The hero says about his love: "But  let it no longer disturb you". The line implies that
-- The hero's attention was previously noticed by the addressee,   it disturbed her, and she made it clear for the hero.
-- The interactions with the  addressee happened recently, otherwise she would  have stopped worrying already, without the hero's prompt. So, the first line takes the meaning: "I loved you just recently", which sounds frivolous, like a folk story about lieutenant Rzhevsky (поручик Ржевский).
-- Knowing that the  addressee  does not want  his attention,  the hero addresses her with the confession of his (past) love.  Polite in form, the address  is inconsiderate, impudent.
-- The hero wants the addressee to stop worrying about  his advances, to put her at ease;
-- The attempt to mollify the addressee in this line means that the addressee is  not an image of a woman, but a real woman, the hero attempts to manipulate.
(4)   Qualities of love: "I loved you silently, hopelessly, / Languishing with timidity, with jealousy."   The hero highly recommends to the addressee exceptional qualities of his love, while   threatening that the love is expiring. This is inconsistent with the idea of hero's selflessness. It sounds more like an auctioneer's  call:  "Going! Going! Gone!"
(5)  Declared sincerity of  love. Love can not be insincere. "Sincere love" is a tautology. Saying that the love is not just sincere, but exceptionally sincere ("so sincere" ) makes it sound like a sales pitch rather than a confession.
(6) The punch line. The last lines "I loved you so tenderly, so sincerely, God help you to find   some other love like this"  mean:
-- "My love was exceptional. Good luck for you to find such a love like mine again". The hero expresses doubt that the addressee can be so lucky again.
--  The comparison of possible  "loves" (which is itself an anomaly in Russian, since the Russian  word "любовь" is almost never used in a plural form) and the idea that the two "loves" may be identical brings up the impersonality of the poem.
-- R. Jakobson [2] noticed grammatical incongruity of the last line. "The text intentionally opens a path to two different interpretations of the last line.  It can be understood as invocation type denouement. On another hand, the fossilized expression "дай вам бог" ("God  help you…") … could be interpreted as  sort of  a mode of  "irreality", meaning that without God's interference the addressee will hardly encounter  another love like this. In the last case the line may be understood as an example  of "implicit negation"…". 
-- The hero implies that the addressee is seeking exactly the kind of love he is offering, and it should  not matter to her, from whom. Rather than as an insult, it is, probably, intended as yet another way of persuasion.
(7)   Addressee. The ultimate uncertainty in the poem is the addressee. There is nothing personal about this poem: it could be sent to any  woman who did not respond to the hero's attention yet. We do not know any specifics about their relationship except that she was disturbed  by his advances.

Now, I am ready to give the  second interpretation  of the poem, which takes into account all the anomalies  above.
The poem is not a lyrical one,  rather this is a dramatic monologue. There are two characters: the adventurous hero (Don Juan-type) and an implied addressee.  A short time ago, they had some superficial interactions,  and the addressee showed her concern over the hero's attention.  In the (written)  monologue, the hero makes another attempt to win her over by trying to calm her apprehension, by praising  unique qualities and rarity of his love, by pressuring her to act fast  while the fading love lasts. 

Generally,  one of the features of a dramatic monologue is an unreliable narrator. And indeed, the hero speaks about love, but his impudence, insistence on the fleeting nature of his interest to the woman  allows the reader to see that he, actually, means not personal "love" (as Russians usually understand it),   but  some transactional relationships.

"Unreliable narrator" is the main literary device incredulous readers see there. The same literary device Pushkin uses in "Eugene Onegin" to create reversible text. I plan to show that Chekhov used the same device in every short story in the Little Trilogy.

The second meaning is opposite to the first one, and, in my opinion,   no reconciliation can preserve  the integrity of a poem.  It confirms that ILY is a reversible poem.  Q.E.D.

It is clear now, why the semioticians [2,3,4] had difficulty to come up with a consistent interpretation: they were not the implied readers. On one hand, they believed the popular interpretation is the only possible one. On another hand, they applied  their "cold mind" to the text and discovered anomalies there. So, they were not fully "credulous" or fully "incredulous". To be fully "incredulous" readers and to discover Pushkin's hidden message, they should be open minded from the start.

The poem turned out to be  an illustration to a recurring theme of "Eugene Onegin", which is high  society's  "love games" . See, for example, Ch 1, X:

How early learned  he to be hypocritical,
To hide his hope, be jealous,
To dissuade, to assure,
To appear gloomy, to languish,
To appear proud and obedient, 
Attentive or indifferent,
How  fiery eloquent he was,
How careless he was  in his love letters!
…..
The poem could be one of those  "careless" love letters Onegin wrote in his youth. The hero, too,  tries "to dissuade, to assure" at the same time,  stressing both unusual "sincerity"  and the fleeting nature of his love. He "hides his hope" and mentions  "jealousy"  at the same time,  and talks about "languishing".

To a contemporary reader, these tricks seem familiar. They evoke four  principles (reciprocity, scarcity, consistency, liking), out of Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion, which is a  bedrock of contemporary  consumer psychology.
"How did Pushkin know?",  may ask  a skeptical reader.  Pushkin  knew about persuasion, for example, from the same Aristotle rhetoric. Besides,  in his economic theory, Aristotle already mentioned that the price of goods depends on the relationship between supply and desire. The rare commodity will  be more precious to consumers than a ubiquitous one. Thus, the scarcity principle was familiar to ancient Greeks, and so  Pushkin had to know it as well.

Pushkin, also in "Eugene Onegin",  explicitly mentioned  "science of tender passion" which was "glorified by Nazon" (Ovid). Ovid's book gives some basic cynical advices to lovers. Pushkin could find the principles of "consistency" and "liking" there already. Pushkin says that Onegin was a "true genius" in this science. Sure, if he wrote the letter like ILY, he was.

As Pushkin said, in Russia,  a credulous reader "who is devoted to his faith" is  "Hundred times blessed", while  woe is to an "incredulous" reader. It was so during Pushkin's time, and it did not change. Credulous readers of ILY dominate, incredulous readers do not get to publish academic articles about ILY.

But it does not mean that incredulous readers do not exist. Nepomniashy [7]  published  a  report about an interesting empirical study:
"a professor at a philosophy department asked students how they understand the last two lines of Pushkin's poem:  "I loved you so tenderly, so sincerely,  God help you to find   some other love like this.  " Out of 20 students, 19 said that this is an irony, and the twentieth said: "It is a mockery". "

Academic Nepomniashy was very angry about these results: "This is an unhuman understanding of a clear text which has  unbelievably many meanings  ("многозначен невероятно") . " This quote can give a reader a clue that the fight for  sentimental interpretation of the poem ILY  is perceived in Russia as an existential fight for preserving the national heritage and the Russian national character. But Pushkin gets a chance  to be understood.

Despite the efforts of authoritative critics to canonize the sentimental popular meaning, the second, cynical,  meaning in Pushkin’s reversible text remains visible to those who are sensitive to the poem as a whole — to the play of words, sentences, and tone, rather than just to emotional buzzwords. Other poets are often such readers.

Consider the parody by Kirill Veprikov, which begins:

I loved you, but, maybe, not very much,
Who knows, perhaps I loved somebody else?
Possibly, it was not even me, but another man.
Regardless — who cares now?

The parody works because it exaggerates what  lies in the text beyond the love-cluster. Veprikov exposes the second interpretation.

Naum Korzhavin wrote an article where he fully supported the common interpretation of the poem ILY. Yet, he also wrote a poem, which can be literally translated like this:

Earthly language is very brief.
It will be like this forever.
With another one: it means, the same, as with me,
But with another one.

I have overcome the pain,
Turned my back and went away
With another one… It means: the same as with you,
But with another one.
1945

The poem addresses the two last lines of ILY, stressing implied indifference both by the hero and by the addressee, impersonality of the poem.
 
3. Conclusion

I introduced the concept of reversible text and demonstrated that Pushkin, indeed, wrote the poem ILY as a reversible text so that the two categories of readers he clearly described in the stanza L1 in chapter 4 of  "Eugene Onegin" see different meanings there: one is depiction of sentimental love, another is a hypocritical   letter Onegin in his youth could write to one of his interests. I confirmed B. Gasparov's thesis that Pushkin does not make all his ideas available  to every reader equally. We are just scratching the surface trying to reach  the true  meaning of this heritage.
I want to end with the long quote from M. Gershenzon [8]

"Beauty is a lure, but beauty is an obstacle. A beautiful form of art tempts everybody to gather and look.  It does not deceive, but weak attention is swallowed by beauty; for weak eyes it is not transparent. .. Only a  tense and sharp gaze can penetrate it and see the depth under it. Nature protects its little children, like puppies,   with blessed  blindness. Art gives each person only what he can withstand: to one it gives the whole of its truth, because he is mature, to another it gives a part, and to a third it shows only its brilliance, the charm of its form, … Pushkin's poetry, too, conceals profound revelations, yet the crowd glides effortlessly through it, rejoicing in its smoothness and brilliance, mindlessly reveling in the music of the verses, the clarity and vividness of the images. Only now, after so many years, are we beginning to see these depths."

Bibliography

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(The Pushkin Handbook, ed. by David Bethea. Madison: University of Wisconsin press, 2005)
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7. "Нет истины, где нет любви" (из интервью с В. С. Непомнящим) https://www.manwb.ru/articles/arte/literature/nepomniashy/
М. Гершензон. Мудрость Пушкина . Том 1.