«Пир во время чумы» А. С. Пушкина: ценностный аспект

Abstract

The proposed article reveals the problem of objective perception of the fourth of Pushkin's “short tragedies” – “A Feast in Time of Plague”. The article also indicates a significance of “A Feast in Time of Plague” in Pushkin's literary heritage as a whole. Within the framework of axiology and imagology (as a discipline directly connected with comparative studies) authors trace the connection of Pushkin's works with other samples of world literature, as a discussion about values in time when every aspect of society was being called into doubt. The article also highlights the question of the culminating role of “A Feast in Time of Plague” in the cycle of “short tragedies”. The poet often deliberately diminishes his role in the writing of his works; his plays were sometimes presented as a translations of works that never existed. Conversely, deliberately borrowed plots appear before the reader as a new look at things, in contrast to the original. Thus, the authors of the article try to explain how the poet manages to integrate borrowings into his works. His literary heritage represents common European values and plots. But Pushkin does not stop there. Pushkin's “short tragedies” are in fact an integral part of his involvement in the European worldview. The article explains how a simple translation of John Wilson's “The city of the Plague” had become an independent work by Aleksander Pushkin. Our most important conclusion in short sounds like this: the problems raised by Pushkin in his “A Feast in Time of Plague” are mostly absent in Wilson's “The city of the Plague”. In this sense Pushkin’s “short tragedy” is an absolutely new word in world literature. Pushkin had achieved this result with some decisive and crucial changes (as compared with “The city of the Plague”) in two texts inside “the translation” – “Mary Gray’s Song” and “Master’s Song”(or “A Song on the Plague”). The first Pushkin's interpretation is much more important than Mary Gray’s common play in “Scots and English” with Loisa. Pushkin's understanding of the Scottish imageme leads him to Mary Gray’s characteristic as not only “sad”, but “sophisticated” (“zadumchivaya”). As for the second one, Wilson's elegy about physical destroying, had become Pushkin's elegy about metaphysical immortality.