Finding the Middle Ground: Krestovskii, Tur, and the Power of Ambivalence in Nineteenth-Century Russian Women's Prose (original) (raw)
Related papers
Through a Glass Darkly: Doubling and Poetic Self-Image in Pushkin's “The Gypsies”
The Russian Review, 2009
Mozart and Salieri. Lenskii and Onegin. Dmitrii Samozvanets and Boris Godunov. Evgenii and Tsar Peter. Don Juan and the Commander. The young Count and Silvio. Pugachev and Petia Grinev. The Italian Improviser and the poet-dandy Charskii. ... Even the casual reader cannot help but notice the prevalence of mutually contentious, yet perversely interdependent, male character pairs, or doubles, in Pushkin's narrative and dramatic works. 1 This feature of Pushkin's literary imagination receives occasional mention in the scholarship; in the present article I propose to build upon some previous scholarly insights to consider the overarching significance of doubles for Pushkin's creative psyche. I will do so through close analysis of his 1824 poema "The Gypsies," a work that at first glance would seem to have little to do with the literary double. 2 That doubling can nevertheless be shown to be operant in even such a text lends credence to my hypothesis that this device is an essential engine of Pushkin's poetic imagination, one that is deeply implicated in his creative aspirations and insecurities and, indeed, in the poetic self-portrait that can be traced in I would like to express my thanks to the anonymous readers of my manuscript and especially to Irene Masing-Delic, all of whom offered helpful suggestions for revision that have greatly improved the final result. Work on this article was supported in part by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. All translations from the original Russian are my own unless otherwise noted. 1 For the sake of simplicity, I will henceforth use the term "narrative" to refer to all non-lyrical, plot-based genres, whether written in verse, prose, or dramatic form. The focus in the present article is on male doubles, although female doubles also play an important role in Pushkin's works.
Pushkin Review/ Пушкинский вестник, 2020
Vladislav Khodasevich is known not only as a poet who idolized Pushkin, but also as a Pushkinist. Yet, when the issue of Pushkinian influence in his poem "Не матерью, но тульскою крестьянкой…" (Not by my mother, but by a Tula peasant woman…, 1922) comes up, only one parallel is noted: Khodasevich depicted his wet nurse, the Tula peasant Elena Kuzina, in such a way as to make the name of Pushkin's wet nurse Arina Rodionovna come to mind for the reader. The present article aims to demonstrate that Pushkin permeates literally every cell of this poem, all the more so since Pushkin is made into an index of Russianness in it. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the poem was created, the issue of Russianness was front and center: a new Soviet dictatorship and internationalism had supplanted "Old" Russia. Khodasevich, who was planning to emigrate, had to come to grips with his identity. He felt his almost filial attachment to "Old" Russia acutely, and he saw in Pushkin its personification. A monographic analysis of Khodasevich's poem is needed to demonstrate how this set toward Russianness and the concomitant veneration of Pushkin found their embodiment in the poem’s generic range, lyrical plot, intertextuality, rhetoric, and word choice.
The Question ofDramatic Form in Pushkin's Boris Godunov
Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 1982
The question of dramatic form was raised by the first critics of Boris Godunov (1825). While appreciative of the play's historical themes, they were baffled by Pushkin's structure, style, and presentation of characters. In a review of the play in The Moscow Telegraph, one critic voiced a common concern: "Pushkin's long-awaited work [Boris Godunov] has finally been presented to the public. The poet does not call it a tragedy, a drama, or historical scenes. Of course, he knew what he had written, but, it seems, wanted to see what others would uncover.... Now this is an interesting challenge for Russian critics."1 Brought up on French neoclassical drama, which reigned on the Russian stage well into the nineteenth century, Russian critics strongly disapproved of Pushkin's departure from the accepted norms of dramatic composition. They found Boris Godunov a shapeless, fragmented, and generally undignified work. Typical was the remark by the noted writer, Pavel Katenin: "What good is the play? What does it try to prove? It does not seem appropriate for the theater. One cannot call it a poem, a novel, or a history. Indeed, one cannot call it anything."2 A similar concern for the dramatic form of Boris Godunov was expressed in the official censor's report. In it, the anonymous censor stated that Pushkin did not follow established dramatic traditions, relied heavily on Nikolai Karamzin's history of the Russian State, introduced clergy, and resorted to vulgar speech. The result was a play wholly unsuited for the Russian stage. Indeed, the censor concluded that Boris Godunov was such a weak dramatic work that Pushkin ought to rewrite it as an historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott.3 Through his influential articles on Pushkin, Vissarion Belinskü redirected critical attention away from literary problems to historical and political themes Citing the epic quality of Boris Godunov, Belinskü stressed Pushkin's reliance on historical sources and his use of a rich, varied Russian language.