The passage from neoclassicism to romanticism was formally liberating, as poets reached beyond strictly defined genre categories in their quest to express the era's profound sense of lost unity; scholars have since remained divided, however, on whether the resulting expressions of longing constitute an “authentic tragic vision” (3). Maksim Hanukai's Tragic Encounters offers a satisfying, extensively researched, and lucidly argued response to this body of critical scholarship, interrogating its primary theorists’ reliance on a single author or national tradition, as well as their confinement to the dramatic genre. His study approaches romantic tragedy as a broad and flexible mode, accommodating a range of hybrid genres unified by recurring themes and ethical concerns; he contemplates its expansive and protean dimensions through a comparative analysis of four generically ambiguous works of Aleksandr Pushkin that “make significant use of the tragic modality” (7). Considering diverse narrative forms and avoiding the impulse to reduce the poet's unconventional, ever-changing body of work to a single, stable “tragic vision,” Hanukai outlines the evolution of Pushkin's sense of the tragic, contextualizing it within broader European trends to reveal both an active engagement with developments outside of Russia and a “sustained interest in redefining the conventions and visions of tragedy” (7).
The first chapter rereads The Gypsies as a reflection of Pushkin's disillusionment with the radicalism he encountered among proponents of the Greek independence movement during his exile in Chișinău. Hanukai convincingly argues that the work presents a critique of Rousseau's romantic ideology, which the young poet blamed for the movement's ultimate failure. Finally, he considers Pushkin's oscillation between dramatic and lyrical modes to distinguish between the non-redemptive tragic plot of Aleko and the cathartic acts of his poetic creator. The second chapter examines the formally innovative Boris Godunov, taking up the familiar question of genre that dates to the drama's very inception. Here, Hanukai draws upon classic studies of narrative form to demonstrate how Pushkin set his heroes in opposition through modes of emplotment, as Godunov's severe, traditional tragedy alternates with the pretender's dynamic romance. Analyzing the coexistence of these modes within the dramatic frame ultimately reveals the centrality “not of comedy, but of irony to Pushkin's historical and dramatic visions”—layers of irony that went unrecognized by the play's initial critics, who had sought to define it in more familiar generic terms (70). The third chapter addresses The Little Tragedies, which Hanukai considers Pushkin's most direct and sustained engagement with the evolving ethics and aesthetics of European romanticism. The tragedy in each of these four short plays results from its hero's transgressive pursuit of some decadent end, and Hanukai argues that the cycle represents Pushkin's exploration of the radical sensibility emanating from l’école frénétique of the late 1820s—which he terms the “sublime noir” in homage to its provenance—within the moral framework of tragedy. Hanukai devotes his final chapter to The Bronze Horseman, which inscribes Pushkin's reflections on “Russia's tragic encounter with modernity,” paying particular attention to scenes of visual apprehension. Hanukai posits that Pushkin's mediation of the discursive space between symbol and allegory amounts to a meditation on “the precarious, even fateful, act of reading meaning into images” (138). The poem's preoccupation with the fraught act of viewing and interpreting—and indeed, the impossibility of locating a single, stable meaning within—reflects the poet's concern with the status of late romantic values within contemporary Russian society. The coda shifts focus from literature to life, surveying the enduring scholarly impulse to interpret events leading to Pushkin's death within the moral frame of the tragic in order to illustrate how the poet's biography succumbed as easily as his works to these generic modes of emplotment.
Hanukai's chronological examination of these generically ambivalent texts from romanticism's pivotal decade of 1824–33 highlights Pushkin's “embeddedness in the broader Romantic milieu,” as well as his transformation of the major poetic and intellectual currents flowing from the west (8). Individual chapters reveal a comprehensive knowledge of literary and theoretical traditions, and Hanukai's fresh, surprising insights yield unorthodox but persuasive re-readings of canonical texts, always rooted in the scholarly tradition but never bound by prevailing interpretations. Taken as a whole, the study reveals the capacious, adaptable nature of Pushkin's tragic vision as it reflected narrative forms from abroad and refracted them into a unique, late-romantic sensibility which, tempered by the poet's dominant mode of irony, invited the possibility of endless re-vision. Tragic Encounters thus represents a significant contribution to our field and beyond, broadening our understanding of the poet and his works, their redefinition of romanticism's tragic dimensions—and, ultimately, the conceptual boundaries of the tragic mode itself.
