Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T13:50:22.193Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Historicism or Providentialism? Pushkin's History of Pugachev in the Context of French Romantic Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Alexander Dolinin
Alexander Dolinin*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Aleksandr Pushkin 1799-1999 , Summer 1999 , pp. 291 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. My sense of how communities shape an imagined idea of themselves as a nation depends on Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983)Google Scholar, and Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire ,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See Zoshchenko, Mikhail, “Shestaia povest’ I. P. Belkina,” Zvezda, 1937, no. 1: 25–32 Google Scholar; “V pushkinskie dni” (originally in Krokodil, 1937, no. 3) in Zoshchenko, Mikhail, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Leningrad, 1986–1987), 2: 416–21Google Scholar. For an excellent structuralist analysis of Zoshchenko's use of Pushkinian and other subtexts in the Belkin tale, see Reyfman, Irina, “Shestaia povest’ Belkina: Mikhail Zoshchenko v role Proteiia,” in Gasparov, Boris, Hughes, Robert P., Paperno, Irina, eds., Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, California Slavic Studies, vol. 15 (Berkeley, 1992), 393–414.Google Scholar

3. Karen Petrone, “Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Politics and Culture in Soviet Celebrations, 1934–1959” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994) includes a discussion of the resistance to Stalinist norms concealed in some of the celebration's speeches and publication.

4. Levitt, Marcus C., Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca, 1989), 4.Google Scholar

5. See Bitov, A. and Gabriadze, R., “Svobodu Pushkinu!” Sintaksis, 1990, no. 27: 167–75Google Scholar. They have also issued a limited edition of the first part of Pushkin za granitsei, Pushkin v Ispanii (Paris, [1989]). That edition indicates diat parts 2–4 of the series will take Pushkin to Paris, New York, and China; part 5 is “Pushkin and Dumas.” There is also a sequence on Pushkin in Georgia (1990), parts of which were published in Virolainen, M. N., ed., Legendy i mify o Pushkine (St. Petersburg, 1994), 303–18.Google Scholar

6. I limit the list to books in English. The list would be much longer if it included significant articles, of which there have been dozens, many of them never incorporated into later books, and if it included translations, which have long been a very important part of Pushkin scholars’ work in making the poet available to a broader audience. Also, beyond the mention of D. S. Mirsky's early book, I have not included books published in England, although of course many have been extremely influential, for example, John Bayley's 1971 study. I leave British books out regretfully, largely from the fear that my list would not be complete; moreover, for all the differences in tradition and training, British and American scholars have long been in very close touch, evidence of which is the inclusion of Wendy Slater's article in this volume.

7. Nora, Pierre, “The Era of Commemoration,” in his Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. Kritzman, Lawrence D., trans. Goldhammer, Arthur, 3 vols. (New York, 1996–98), 3: 614.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 3: 609.

9. Engelstein, Laura, “Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 864–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar